There are lots of ways to find drivers, such as from the manufacturer website(Lenovo, HP, Dell), vendor website(Intel, Nvidia), or from Microsoft Update Catalog.
At first I was downloading the SCCM drivers from Lenovo website, but it scared me after I imported to SCCM – 3.5G Files! That’s way to big…
So I started some digging, and here is an excellent article on finding the smallest drivers available( from microsoft update catalog).
Basically we just need to find out the unknown devices in our computer by using powershell, then using Microsoft Update Catalog to download the small drivers.
Here is the powershell script to find Device ID on unknown devices:
Get-WmiObject Win32_PNPEntity | Where-Object{$_.ConfigManagerErrorCode -ne 0} | Select Name, DeviceID | Export-CSV C:\Drivers.csv
Get-WmiObject Win32_PNPEntity | Where-Object{$_.Name –Match “VGA”} | Select Name, DeviceID | Export-CSV C:\Drivers1.csv
After you got the csv file, you use something like VEN_8086&DEV_1616 to search drivers from Microsoft website.
Unfortunately most results are just for windows 10 drivers, I need windows 7 drivers 🙁
In the end, I have to use Lenovo Update Retriever to get some drivers out…Still around 1 GB, but it is much smaller now …
Some Cool Links:
https://www.windows-noob.com/forums/topic/10856-sccm-2012-osd-apply-driver-packages-without-importing-them-to-the-database/
Auto Apply Drivers vs. Apply Driver Package in Task Sequences
SCCM 2012 – OSD driver good practice
Lenovo Update Retriever & Thin Installer:
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/tvan-admin#ur
Windows Update Catalog: