During one of those late nights browsing the net I stumbled across what turned out to be a time-saver in the high-roller end, what is the real interesting thing is that it is a was a total coincidence I got to think of an alternative use for a small utility aimed at a complete different audience.
If you are using MS-SCCM 2007 you know the hassle of hardware certification of new and old pc-models. If you wish to keep a tight leach on which drivers you install to the PC’s you deploy using MS-SCCM, you have to figure out which drivers are actually needed and obtain unpacked versions. Now even if this may sound like a very simple task, experience quickly makes you think twice, take a modern Laptop PC and try to see how many odd hardware devices it contains.
The process has so far been to install the PC using your installation CD, then download the drivers from the manufacture and install them and figure out which driver was related to which unknown hardware device. Then you would need to unpack the strange driver packages and figure out which files was actually required and import them to SCCM. Often you would end up with installation packages which could not easily be unpacked (if at all), and you would have to do a lot of manual labour and testing to obtain the drivers.
Well think again… and let me cut your hardware certification time to a fraction… Now you take your new laptop out of the box, start it up and let it install the preloaded OS. Then install “Driver Magician” and use the build in backup function to extract the drivers, finally import the extracted driver-directory to SCCM and you are done, the pc model can now be deployed using SCCM.
“Driver Magician” was not actually made with this in mind, it is actually what I would describe as a geek tool. It is intended for those who often install their computers and wish to minimize the time it takes to install the drivers, but believe me as a side effect it does a VERY good job of hardware certification for use with MS-SCCM.
This mean you can likely save at least 4-6 hours per pc model you need to hardware certify.
Piece of pie..
Watch a geeked YouTube intro, mind you this is not aimed at SCCM usage but more the original intend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uq6U0y25mE