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.

It is quite easy to check if Windows is still listing old device drivers on the computer system. All that needs to be done is to access the Windows Device Manager. The easiest way to do this is to press [Windows Pause] which will open the System Properties. A click on Hardware > Device Manager will open the device manager.

The first step in there is to enable the display of hidden devices. Hidden devices are all devices that are currently not connected to the computer system. This can be old device drivers or hardware devices that are currently not connected. To enable hidden devices click on View > Show Hidden Devices.

Windows will now display those devices in the list of hardware devices. Now it is time to click through all the hardware categories of the device manager to scan for devices that are not longer in use. This can be computer monitors, input devices like keyboards or mice, video cards and practically any computer hardware that can be replaced.

A right-click on such a device will provide the means to uninstall the device driver from the computer system. The uninstallation should remove the device entry from the device manager. Nothing can go wrong if you happen to uninstall working hardware devices from the system. Windows will either automatically install the new drivers at the next startup or prompt for a driver disk to perform the installation.

Cautious users might want to create a device driver backup before starting the process.