I have never been a fan of UPDATING drivers. It seems there are always bits left behind that cause no end issues somewhere down the road. I try to make a point of always uninstalling the old driver first. Once in a while I’ll go thru and do a clean up, especially when I notice extended boot times or instability. One of the cleanups I will do is make sure no unused drivers are residing in the system.
- To do that, press “Win + X” and select “Command Prompt (Admin)” from the list of options. If you are using Windows 7 or Vista, you can search and open command prompt as admin in your start menu.
- Type the following command and press the Enter button to execute the command:
SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1
What the above command does is force all the non-present or old and invisible drivers to show up in the Device Manager list. Once you have done this, you can proceed with the uninstallation.
Uninstall Old Drivers In Windows
- To uninstall the old drivers, press “Win + X” and select “Device Manager” from the list of options. If you are using Windows Vista or 7, you can search for device manager in the start menu.
- Go to “view” and select the option “show hidden devices” to reveal all the hidden and old drivers.
The good thing about this feature is that all the old drivers are faded out, so you can easily identify the old or non-present drivers from current drivers.
- Select the old driver you want to uninstall, right-click and select the uninstall option.