With Driver Sweeper you can scan for those leftovers and remove them. The interface has not changed a lot. You still have the sidebar menu to access functions and settings of the program. Here you can select Analyse and Clean to display the list of supported hardware manufacturers. Included are AMD and NVIDIA, Microsoft, Intel, HP and Realtek among others.

You need to select the manufacturers and device types that you want to scan the system for. This could be an issue for inexperienced users. A click on the Analyse button scans the system for driver leftovers. All orphan drivers are displayed in a list with their name, file type and path on the system. In this case, I have used the program to find AMD display driver leftovers. As you may recall, I switched recently to NVIDIA.

All entries are selected by default with the option to uncheck items so that they are not removed from the system. The software crawls both the hard drives and the Windows Registry for leftovers. A click on Clean removes all selected files and Registry entries from the system. A reboot is usually required afterwards.

A backup is automatically created which means it is possible to restore individual driver files or all files that have been cleaned previously. Removal of the ATI driver leftovers on my PC system freed up 88 Megabytes and removed dozens of ATI related files in the system32 folder.

So what has changed since version 2.1? The development log lists many changes, here are the noteworthy ones:

• Improved Registry, driver and directory cleaning methods
• Support for additional user interface languages
• Service and Process stopping features to prevent entries from being locked
• Added Asus Sound, Microsoft Keyboard, Intel Chipset, NEC USB, Fresco USB, Marvell Storage, JMicron Storage, JHP Printer, Realtek Lan cleaning

Driver Support has been improved as you can see from the listing. Driver Sweeper is still compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. You can download the software from the developer website. Make sure you pay attention to the setup as you may install third party software otherwise.

The interface itself was revamped a bit but has not changed a lot otherwise. Driver Sweeper is still offering the functionality to remove specific system drivers from a Windows operating system. The supported drivers that can be removed are from Ati, Nvidia, Creative, Microsoft and Realtek.

The user can select one or multiple of the supported manufacturers in the main menu. A click on the Analyse button will start the system scan which results in a display of all files, folders and Registry entries related to those drivers.

All or only some of these items can then be cleaned from the computer system. The main intention of Driver Sweeper is to act as a driver cleanup after the official driver uninstallation. It can also be handy if a driver cannot be uninstalled with the uninstaller provided by the driver manufacturer.

Driver Sweeper 2.1 comes with improved cleaning algorithms and full Windows 7 support. This version (actually version 2.0) has been rewritten from scratch. It does require the Microsoft .net Framework 3.0 now to be installed before it can be installed or executed.

Interested users can download the latest version of Driver Sweeper at the developer’s website.

Driver Sweeper has been covered about two years ago at Ghacks. The software has been designed to cleanup device driver leftovers both on the hard drive and the Windows Registry. The software program comes as a portable version or installer and can cleanup driver and Registry leftovers of the following hardware devices:

• AGEIA – PhysX
• ATI – Display
• Creative – Sound
• Microsoft -Mouse
• NVIDIA – Chipset
• NVIDIA – Display
• Realtek – Sound

While that does not cover all hardware devices it does provide the means to cleanup several of the most popular. All the user needs to do is to select and check one or multiple entries from the list and click on the Analyse button afterwards.

The program will scan the system for files and Registry settings for the selected type of hardware and display those in a list. All entries are checked by default and can be cleaned from that window. It is also possible to uncheck certain entries before starting the device driver cleanup process.

The developers of Driver Sweeper are recommending to uninstall the hardware using the uninstallation routines provided by the Windows operating system and / or hardware manufacturer before running their product to find and cleanup the leftovers. They also suggest to run Driver Sweeper in Safe Mode so that the tool can safely delete the files and Registry settings.

The software has an option to create backups of the device drivers which is highly recommended before starting the cleanup process. Another possibility is the software device driver backup which we covered before at Ghacks.

Driver Sweeper can be used to get rid of leftovers after the normal software uninstallation has been executed on the system. It is basically a software that makes sure that no old or incompatible drivers are still installed on the system. It currently supports Nvidia and Ati drivers, Creative (sound), Realtek (sound), Microsoft (mouse) and Ageia drivers.

The process looks like the following. The normal uninstallation routine is started, the computer is rebooted into safe mode and Driver Sweeper is scanning the system for leftovers and getting rid of them in the process. A log file lists all deleted files afterwards.

It is necessary to select the drivers that you want to scan the system for. This is however a pretty straightforward move and should not lead to complications. Just make sure you do not scan and remove the wrong ones.