Enable/Disable device driver via command line

You can use the sc.exe utility for this.

sc query type= driver | findstr WHAT_IM_LOOKING_FOR

If you find what you're looking for, you can at stop the driver with:

sc stop EXACT_DRIVER_NAME_AS_LISTED_BY_QUERY

Obviously you'll need a shell with administrator privileges to do this. If you're looking to automate this at login, you can make a batch file and install it as an administrator with task scheduler. Tasks installed that require administrator privileges, but were installed by an administrator, will not prompt for privileges at startup, but will be granted them automatically.


pnputil is (now?) included with Win10.

pnputil /disable-device "PCI/VEN_..."

Look up the instance path in Device Manager and specify it here.

pnputil /enable-device "PCI/VEN_..."

Run as admin.


I was able to install the free devcon.exe utility inside the Windows 10 driver kit from Microsoft.

This utility will let you enable / disable whatever you see in Driver Manager; in my case, I found that the "High Definition Audio Bus" from Microsoft on Windows 10 was badly written and was consuming 10% of CPU, always.

I disabled it with:

devcon.exe disable PCI\VEN_8086"&"DEV_9D71*

You have to run this as administrator, so I put this into a .bat file, and made a 'run as administrator' shortcut for it.