US 8,621,452 B2Granted

Device driver rollback

AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation

InventorJason T. Cobb

Life of this patent

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Abstract

Techniques for device driver management/installation are provided. In at least some embodiments, a device driver management system can be employed by a user to selectively rollback a currently installed device driver to one or a plurality of previously installed device driver(s). Additionally, the system can be employed by the user to revert to a pristine state of not having the device driver installed at all, for example, the NULL driver (e.g., in the situation in which the first driver installed on the device causes machine instability). The system stores information associated with driver(s) running on a specific device and allows a user to selectively revert to any one of a plurality of previously installed device driver(s), for example, if they experience a problem with a newer driver. Rollback point(s) can be stored, for example, in the system registry.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A computer-implemented method comprising:

receiving a request to install a first driver on a computing device, the first driver being configured to communicate with two or more devices associated with the computing device;
determining whether a second driver is already installed on the computing device, the second driver being configured to communicate with the two or more devices;
responsive to a determination that the second driver is already installed on the computing device, creating a rollback point that stores driver state information and, if selected, enables the first driver to be uninstalled from the computing device and the second driver to be installed on the computing device;
and
adding the rollback point to a list of at least one other rollback point such that the list includes multiple rollback points that each correspond to a different driver state for the two or more devices and the at least one other rollback point associated with a different driver state than a current driver state for the first driver and the second driver, the list being usable to return the two or more devices to one of the multiple rollback points based at least in part on whether a restore point associated with the one of the multiple rollback points is a first rollback point for the two or more devices.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.