as this requirement was not consistently enforced. Some device driver installers have a user interface GUI, often requiring user configuration input. The absence of a user interface does not mean that the installation of the device driver is not successful. Besides, Windows 10 device drivers are not allowed to include a user interface. The Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) 10.x is used for network devices by the Windows 10 operating system. Network device drivers for Windows XP use NDIS 5.x and may work with subsequent Windows operating systems, but for performance reasons network device drivers should implement NDIS 6.0 or higher. Similarly, WDDM is the driver model for Windows Vista and up, which replaces XPDM used in graphics drivers. Device Manager The Device Manager is a Control Panel applet in Microsoft Windows operating systems. It allows users to view and control the hardware attached to the computer. It allows users to view and modify hardware device properties, and is also the primary tool to manage device drivers. Criticism The Windows Driver Model, while a significant improvement over the VxD and Windows NT Driver Model used before it, has been criticised by driver software developers, most significantly for the following: Interactions with power management events and plug and play are difficult. This can lead to situations where Windows machines cannot enter or exit sleep modes correctly due to bugs in driver code. I/O cancellation is difficult to get right. Complex boilerplate support code is required for every driver. There is no support for writing pure user-mode drivers. There were also a number of concerns about the quality of documentation and samples that Microsoft provided. Because of these issues, Microsoft has released a new set of frameworks on top of WDM, called the Windows Driver Frameworks (WDF; formerly Windows Driver Foundation), which includes Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) and User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF). Windows Vista supports both pure WDM and the newer WDF. KMDF is also available for download for Windows XP and even Windows 2000, while UMDF is available for Windows XP and above. See also Windows Driver Frameworks (WDF) Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF) Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) References Finnel, Lynn (2000). MCSE Exam 70-215, Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. Microsoft Press. . Oney, Walter (2003). Programming the Windows Driver Model, Microsoft Press, . External links WDM Input Output Concepts - This article gives a high level overview