Learng about drivers

In the threads I've asked about my BSODs, and the urls where I look up
the error message, a lot of attention is pointed to drivers.

I was under the impression that drivers were needed for hardware, but
not for programs. Is that true?

If it's programs too, shouldn't I be suspicious of any recently
installed program. (I've been trying to recall what they were, but
with little success. Drivers themselves would be dated the date they
were written, not installed, Any way to figure out which drivers are
newly installed?

I find one list of about 100 drivers I have and another list of 200 I
have. ;-(

I've disabled most of my startup programs, using Anvir which is very
convenient to use.

Win10 runs in safe mode, but how do I bring some, but not all drivers
back, to test which one is causing the problem?


FWIW I'm writing th is from the win7 laptop.

micky wrote:
In the threads I've asked about my BSODs, and the urls where I look up
the error message, a lot of attention is pointed to drivers.

I was under the impression that drivers were needed for hardware, but
not for programs. Is that true?

If it's programs too, shouldn't I be suspicious of any recently
installed program. (I've been trying to recall what they were, but
with little success. Drivers themselves would be dated the date they
were written, not installed, Any way to figure out which drivers are
newly installed?

I find one list of about 100 drivers I have and another list of 200 I
have. ;-(

I've disabled most of my startup programs, using Anvir which is very
convenient to use.

Win10 runs in safe mode, but how do I bring some, but not all drivers
back, to test which one is causing the problem?


FWIW I'm writing th is from the win7 laptop.

Drivers run in Ring0, with the kernel.
Ring0 is privileged.

Drivers are limited, as to what code they can run.
For example, you can't do a "printf" down there.

I think Services run in Ring3, along with your applications.

*******

This covers some debug steps, but Driver verifier remains the
power tool of the lot.

Driver verifier.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...ot-stop-errors

You need to find a "best practices" article, to select useful
settings in there. There were probably a couple MPVs with opinions
on this.

Paul