V4 drivers are available as “In-Box drivers” (included in the Windows operating system), as so called class drivers as well as vendor specific drivers which are provided by the vendor. From an administrator’s point of view, driver management is not an easy task because the drivers have to be provided for 32 and 64-Bit environments and must match the clients and servers’ OS architecture. This list also contains many legacy drivers of devices which are not in use anymore. It takes minutes until you get the updated list. You can see this if you try to install a printer driver using the Windows update. Over the years, the driver database constantly grew larger. But still these drivers contain a lot of vendor specific DLLs. It was only a couple of years ago that universal printer drivers became more common. Hardware vendors wrote their own printer drivers which were mostly device specific. Basically this old model didn’t change much since Windows Server 2000. The main idea behind it was to eliminate the disadvantages of the former V3 driver model. Starting with Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 (and newer), Microsoft introduced a new driver model for the printing subsystem called version 4 drivers (V4 printer driver model).

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