Windows 10 seems to be putting third-party drivers in a separate folder

It seems that with the arrival of the 21H2 update of Windows 10, Microsoft will move third-party drivers to a special folder. They will then be placed in their own oemdrivers folder outside the system32 folder.

The feature is named Writeable_DriverStore and must be activated when booting a new Windows 10 version for the first time. After that, the OS moves all third-party drivers to the “oemdrivers” folder, which is located directly under C:Windows. Which discovered Albacore, which focuses on discovering new features in Windows in particular. This is how he discovered a hitherto unknown this week easter egg on Windows 95.

He verified the upcoming Windows 10 driver feature by finding that after the first boot into a virtual machine, the OS had isolated drivers in the oemdrivers folder. The change is mainly intended to improve the security of Windows 10. Until now, Windows stores drivers, both proprietary and third-party drivers, in the DriverStore located under C:WindowsSystem32.

The change is in Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 21343, which Microsoft released last week. Features from it may appear at the end of this year as Windows 21H2, a major update that Microsoft is planning.