Windows 7 Tip: How To Log Which Drivers Get Loaded During System Boot

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There are tons of drivers existed in your computer. Have you ever wondered how many of them are got loaded every time when your computer boots? The Task Manager lists all running processes but certainly not those .sys and .dll files that loads as the driver to bet the foundation of your running computer. There are quite a few 3rd party system utilities that can help with that but you can actually just use MSConfig, the Windows built in system utility. Thanks to gHacks for the tip.

Press Win + R, type msconfig and hit Enter to open it.

Then, go to Boot tab, and check option Boot Log. Click OK or Apply to take the change affect.

msconfig boot log option thumb - Windows 7 Tip: How To Log Which Drivers Get Loaded During System Boot

Next time when you boot up your computer, all drivers that are loaded into the system will be logged into a log file called ntbtlog.txt in %windir% (mostly, c:\windows) folder. Most of the drivers can be found in %windir%\system32\drivers folder.

ntbtlog file thumb - Windows 7 Tip: How To Log Which Drivers Get Loaded During System Boot

The log file can be very useful when troubleshooting or analyzing your system. Anything suspicious you found in the log file are worth your time doing more research.

Note that the new logs will keep being added at the bottom of the log file every time you reboot your computer until you turn off that Boot Log option again from msconfig command. The size of the log added each time are trivial but every bit can add up into a big file.

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