Solved Driver cleanup

[AirPower4ever]

I was looking at my old systems of Windows 7 and I got to looking at all the drivers I had installed over the years. Some were to test out items like the Intel SATA while others were just updates like USB ports.

The way I looked at these were I went to the device manager > expanded and went to the driver tab there I clicked Update Driver > Browse me computer....> Let me pick from a list....> and there I can see all the drivers I had once installed and I have a lot.

So I was wondering what would be the best way to clear some of them out since like in the case of the Intel SATA, some were good drivers while others really bad performers. I'd like to keep a couple of the good ones, but purge the ones I don't use or will ever use. Or like the USB drivers, I would just never revert back to 2007 drivers, but still would want to keep the more recent ones.

Is there a free software that allows you to see each item and then sees all drivers to then say "yeah, delete that one and that one, etc.?

 

[Callender]

A couple of ways that I use:

UVK to delete drivers.

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Ghostbuster to remove ghosted devices so that they no longer appear. Usage isn't straightforward and requires a few steps.

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Pserve 4 will also uninstall drivers:

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However - it's easy to get it wrong and end up with a non booting machine so you really do need a sysyem image backup that you know how to restore.

 

[Callender]

Links:

UVK - UVK - Ultra Virus Killer

GhostBuster - Download GhostBuster - MajorGeeks

Pserv 4 - pserv Download

 

[AirPower4ever]

Great stuff Callender. Will look at these. Thanks

 

[AirPower4ever]

Callender - those are great tools; especially the UVK one. But it did not help my quest and maybe I did not explain what I am trying to do well enough.

I attached a picture of my Intel RST drivers I have used. Now I am using version 11.7.4.1000 as this was really good for my system. But you can see here I tested some older ones like version 9.1.9.1002, 1003 and 1005. I also tried 10.1.0.1008 and there are more in that list. All of those I mentioned were bad performers on my system so I want to delete those drivers from my system. I also have Marvell drivers, USB drivers, etc. that I want to clean out.

That's what I am trying to do. I can try reverting back to those, reboot and then uninstall the driver, but that might cause some issues and I may get the BSOD (most likely will). So I am trying to find a way to just delete those bad performing drivers and keep only the good ones on my system.

Thank you though for those you posted.

 

[Callender]

RE: Intel drivers. It's not a subject that I know a lot about. I've used AMD machines for some years. On those it possible to run a utility to remove all AMD drivers but I don't know of such a utility for Intel drivers.