Update wireless driver automatically

[rocknrollstar]

Hi, I need to update the wireless driver on 32 laptops. It works successfully when I do it manually (via device Manager). They are all XP.

 

Is there anyway to update these laptops via a batch file or gpo?

 

Thanks for your help.

[Michael]

It's a good question. Accessing Device Manager via MMC (even with Windows 7) Device Manager is in 'Read only' mode, so no driver updates are possible.

 

You can deploy drivers with Windows Deployment Services, but I think this is for/part of OS deployment only.

 

If there is a way I'd like to know too

[Jonah]

Have had to do similar in the past, we found using devcon and copying the driver files locally was the best bet, and sending it out via sccm, though you could send it as a startup script I guess.

 

Along the lines of:

xcopy "\\PATHTO\DRIVERFILES\*.*" "C:\support\drivers\DWLANE5500\"
xcopy "\\PATHTO\DEVCON\devcon.exe" "C:\support\"
cd c:\support
devcon updateni "C:\support\drivers\DWLANE5500\NETwNs32.inf" "PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4232"

 

You would obviously need to change your specifics for the driver inf and the device id vendor, etc, but that worked without issue for us when we did 180+ Dells.

[Michael]

I've also found deploying drivers via WSUS is possible too I'll give this a go myself as it's not something I've tried.

[rocknrollstar]

Thanks both, I've just come across devcon too. The following pages add a bit of info to Jonah's post.

 

Updating drivers from the command line - Marcus Hass&#39 [MS] Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Use DevCon To Install Device Drivers Remotely

DevCon Examples

 

Thanks again

[Michael]

Thanks to you also! I've just deployed an Intel graphics driver using WSUS!