Get rid of unneeded drivers free download device remover

Windows 10 saves all the drivers inside of this folder called DriverStore. Its exact location is:. Since the files inside this folder are critical for system functioning, it is advisable not to touch the folder. Over time, Windows will keep on installing device drivers for all new hardware plugged into the PC like printers, USB devices, monitors, etc. If new drivers are available for a particular device, Windows will automatically try to download and install the latest version through Windows Update.

There is one caveat to this. While Windows keeps on adding and installing new drivers, it will not delete the old ones. The old drivers keep on taking up hard drive space and eventually will fill up the system drive. This is when you should worry about deleting old drivers from the system to free up disk space from the system volume. There are a few ways to clean up the old drivers safely.

We will discuss each method step by step. The Windows NT, and XP Device Manager only normally displays Registry entries for devices that are currently connected, even if you use its'show hidden devices' function, but if you follow these steps you can force it to display redundant devices that are no longer connected, so that you can delete them once and for all.

Here are some additional points that may help. First, before deleting any greyed-out item belonging to old hardware, if you double-click on it or right-click on it and select Properties , select the Drivers page and then click on its Driver Details button, Windows may be able to display a list of all the driver files the old hardware used. Since these are not deleted when you delete the Device Manager entry, it's worth noting down the non-Microsoft ones for later removal by hand, if you want to be thorough.

It's also worth knowing that every time you plug a USB-based interface into a new port, Windows needs to configure the driver for that particular port, and will therefore ask for the drivers to be installed all over again. So if you've got six USB ports and you tend to plug your audio or MIDI interface into whichever one happens to be unused at the time, you could end up with six references to it: one currently valid if the interface is plugged in, and five other 'non-present' or 'ghosted' versions.

This Registry entry duplication also happens if you move a PCI card to another slot, and with some interfaces after you apply a firmware update as part of a new driver release. Uninstalling a soundcard may still leave behind lots of detritus.

Here, you can see some of the references to 'Mia' found in my Registry by Regseeker's 'Find in registry' function, even after I'd correctly uninstalled the Mia soundcard's drivers. If you've got lots of USB devices, you've shuffled your PCI cards around a lot, or your audio interface manufacturer has released lots of firmware updates to add new features like some of RME's range, for instance , you can end up with loads of unwanted references. Aside from the fact that they clutter up the Registry, these entries may prevent you from installing a new interface properly.

This happens because different versions of Windows have various internal limits on the number of device drivers that can be installed. One notorious example that's hit various musicians is the entry limit on internal bit drivers that affects Windows NT, and XP. In the Registry, MIDI devices, for example, appear in the Drivers32 section see screenshot as 'midi', 'midi1', 'midi2', 'midi3' and so on, up to 'midi9', while audio devices appear as 'wave' to 'wave9', and audio mixer devices as 'mixer' to 'mixer9'.

Although there may be duplicates and unwanted entries in these lists, once the maximum of 10 exists in the Registry, no more can be created, preventing you from installing further devices. The problem can be cured by installing Windows again from scratch, although not surprisingly few musicians want to take this drastic step. A second, but potentially more dangerous, approach is to manually delete some of the offending duplicated entries in your Registry that are causing the problem. Matthias Carsten of RME has written an in-depth technical page that you can consult if you're prepared to modify the Registry by hand in this way it's at www.

Having said all that, according to my experiments, the extra devices should all appear in 'greyed out' form in Device Manager when you follow my instructions above, and deleting them here seems a far safer option. M-Audio also provide Midifixutil. Another potential source of problems is the Windows INF files used during the installation process of each hardware device. If, after uninstalling old interface drivers, you have problems when trying to install new ones, it may be because Windows has found an old INF file relating to the hardware.

Try doing a search for your interface name in these 'oem' files and delete any such INF files you find. My INF folder contained a massive objects, but to narrow it down you will mostly find those associated with audio and MIDI interfaces named 'oemX. This makes it considerably easier to find files relating to an old audio or MIDI interface.

Even after you've run a dedicated uninstall utility that removes the driver files, associated INF files, and sometimes even references to the hardware within the Registry, your old audio and MIDI interfaces can still leave behind loads of Registry entries generated by your music applications when they originally found the new hardware and added it to their list of available options.

No automated utility can be trusted to remove these, since it can't know what's safe to delete and what's not. However, one extremely useful freeware utility that I regularly use to help me do the job manually is Regseeker from Hover Inc www.

Apart from a general-purpose 'Clean the Registry' function that's very useful for stripping out invalid items, missing files and bad references, it also includes a 'Find in Registry' function that's perfect for tracking down the final references to old hardware.

Once the search is complete, click on 'Select All' near the bottom of Regseeker's window, then scroll through the list to see if any stray references whose name accidentally incorporates that of your search term have been included. For instance, before I added that extra space character my search included various references to 'WmiApSrv' and 'WMIAdapter', but including the extra space character produced a list without unrelated entries.

Any incorrect ones you happen to find can be individually de-selected from your list by ctrl-clicking on them with the left mouse button. After making sure that Regseeker's 'Backup before deletion' tick-box is ticked, right-click and select 'Delete selected items'.

I've been using Regseeker for several months and have never had a problem after doing so, but should you ever subsequently encounter error messages you can restore the deleted references by using Regseeker's Backup function. Anyone who has changed their audio interface a few times would be well advised to do a search for the names of the old interfaces in the Registry. There could be hundreds or even thousands of unwanted references in there! The problem with this is that as time passes, your Windows machine will be bogged down with lots of unnecessary and old drivers, which eventually may result in problems on your PC.

The problem is that Windows device manager only shows currently connected devices, and there is no option to see hidden or old drivers. Here we show you how to force hidden drivers to appear and how to remove old drivers in Windows Note: this article is based on Windows 10, but it should work with any other previous versions, like Windows 7 and Windows 8, as well.

It may not work altogether or may be prone to crashes and restarts. If that happens, you should use the free Guru 3D tool DDU or Display Driver Uninstaller to completely uninstall your old graphics card drivers before installing the new ones. 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. 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.

Using this tip, you can easily find and uninstall any old and hidden drivers. But yes it does a little extra by showing us the ghosted services too. Thanks for all of your significant work.

The portable devices section will probably have quite a few entries with phones, mp3 players etc. If you recognize the device or drive letter it uses, add that device only, make sure nothing else is selected for removal and try it.

The worst that can happen is the device will be re-detected when you reboot. Currently adding by class will enable all of them as will adding by device or wildcard. Is this what you mean? Also as I have suggested on their site it would be nice to be able to order the devices by clicking on the top of the columns, thereby putting the ghosted devices together, rather than have to scroll down to find them.

Dave: I think my point sort of falls inbetween your request to the developer of sorting by column or being able to right click and add by description. On a side note, tried this out on my 4. TammyTech 6 months ago. HAL Author 6 months ago. Nizar 1 year ago. Ed 4 years ago.