gHacks technology news » remove-drivers http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:38:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Device Driver Cleanup http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/19/device-driver-cleanup/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/19/device-driver-cleanup/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:24:47 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/19/device-driver-cleanup/ It is sometimes not possible to remove all device drivers and Registry settings for a device in the Windows operating system. So called leftovers can cause a series of problems from slow boot times to performance and stability issues. Trying to cleanup the device drivers manually is a complicated long winded process as it does not only mean to delete files and Registry settings but also to find out which files and settings are related to the hardware.

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.

device driver

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/19/device-driver-cleanup/feed/ 9 Get rid of obsolete drivers http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/12/get-rid-of-obsolete-drivers/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/12/get-rid-of-obsolete-drivers/#comments Sun, 12 Nov 2006 10:01:27 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/12/get-rid-of-obsolete-drivers/ Did you ever upgrade the hardware of your computer with, lets say, a new graphic or sound card ? Did you know that the drivers and registry settings of the old cards are still on your system and normally not removed ? This could let to errors especially if you did install additional utilities that try to speed up video playback for instance. I’m going to show a way to remove all those obsolete drivers and registry settings.

All you need is to know the name of the old card, the name of the new card and the freeware Driver Cleaner Professional. Don’t get irritated by the professional, it is completely free to use. Download the freeware and install it. The next step is important. The first thing to do would be to use the uninstall option in Windows to remove everything that could be left from the old drivers.

The best way to run driver cleaner professional would be right after you have uninstalled the old programs but still have the old card connected to your system. Just start Driver Cleaner and choose the name of the drivers that you want to remove, you could choose a general name like ATI or Nvidia which removes all information about those drivers on your system.

Another option would be to choose a specific driver, like ATI WDM and remove that one only. The program removes all references in the registry and all drivers that are stored on the system.

If the new card is already connected to your system you might run into troubles if the card is from the same company. I suggest you still delete all references and install the newest drivers after you have rebooted your machine.

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