Remove unused drivers in vista

Sort this table by column B containing the name of the original INF file and column F driver installation date. Among the drivers with the same name mark for removal all driver versions except the last one.

Cleanmgr will delete all old unused driver versions. However, you should understand that the Roll back driver button in Driver Properties tab of Device Manage will become inactive. How did you import from the txt file to excel? Copy and paste just leaves all the info in the first column of cells. Note that you cannot copy-paste between regular and administrator windows if UAC is active. You have to retype anyway or use the filesystem to transfer commands like make a batch file and then run it from admin.

Nvidia and Intel are so aggravating with their massive drivers that never clean up after themselves. Lots of other places they suck up space around the system, too, like the shader cache. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website. Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account. Disagree Agree.

Notify of. Inline Feedbacks. Next Entry How to rename a Printer in Windows Would love your thoughts, please comment.

Kindly subscribe to TechDirectArchive. Telegram Channel. This is default text for notification bar. Learn more. However, I was reminded that Windows Vista retains old drivers even if you upgrade or change hardware. For example, Vista knows that removable USB devices aren't always connected, but it retains the drivers so that they will be ready the next time you connect the device. So what happens to that driver if you never connect that device to your computer again?

Over time these unused, but still installed, drivers can cause problems if they inadvertently become enabled. They can cause hardware conflicts or just cause the system to behave erratically. Fortunately, in addition to using the tools described in the previous article, when you're troubleshooting a problem in Vista that you suspect is related to a driver, you can locate and remove any old and unused drivers by enabling a special feature in Device Manager that allows it to display non-present devices.

To remove the device drivers for any of the non-present devices, simply right-click on the faded icon and select the Uninstall command. From the resulting list we will exclude the most recent version for each driver. After that, remove remaining drivers using pnputil utility.

In some cases, if some driver is not removed, add the -f switch. Open the elevated PowerShell console and allow to execute the unsigned scripts:.