Sometimes having old drivers installed on your hard drive can prevent new drivers or hardware from working properly. Friendly Computers stumbled upon a useful utility that cleans up and gets rid of any old drivers you don’t need. Read more about it below…
When you upgrade your video card—or even just the drivers—the old version leaves settings and registry entries cluttering up your system—but you can clean them up.
Driver Sweeper works by removing all the extra stuff that the driver uninstaller leaves behind—so you'll need to first uninstall the video card, motherboard, or sound card drivers, and then run the utility to remove all the extra traces. Once you've done so (and rebooted), you can proceed with installing the newer drivers. It's one of those really useful utilities that isn't necessary for most people—in fact, not recommended for the less tech-savvy—but a critical tool that I've used whenever I do an upgrade.
Driver Sweeper is a free download for Windows only.
