Removing Old Drivers ?

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I just changed out (Upgraded) my graphics card but I forgot to uninstall the original card’s drivers first. Now when I go to Windows Update, I constantly see an update for that old driver. There is nothing listed in the control panel’s uninstall program. Is there a GOOD software program that will uninstall previous/old drivers ?? Or how can I find the old driver to uninstall/delete it ?

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Just a thought. Did you try to remove the drivers via device manager if the device is still listed?

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I just changed out (Upgraded) my graphics card but I forgot to uninstall the original card’s drivers first. Now when I go to Windows Update, I constantly see an update for that old driver. There is nothing listed in the control panel’s uninstall program. Is there a GOOD software program that will uninstall previous/old drivers ?? Or how can I find the old driver to uninstall/delete it ?

There is another option. You can just hide the update so it will never prompt you again

Ken

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Hi John,

If you have 64 bit Win7, you can look at all the graphics card files in the SysWOW64 folder (if 32 bit Win 7, then look in System32 folder) and right click each one you find to obtain the driver version number to isolate any belonging to the earlier driver. You can then copy each of the old files to an external drive for safe keeping until you know all is well, and see if the update notification ceases. I did this to get rid of what was left of the old Nvidia driver after I uninstalled it.

However, Ken’s suggestion to hide the update is faster, effective, and is absolutely safer. It depends on whether you want to get rid of some of the old remnants of the earlier driver.

If you decide to get rid of remnants, there still are probably some registry keys left from the old driver. CCleaner is a conservative registry cleaner, so it is safer than some of the more aggressive cleaners out there, and it might clean the registry of old keys related to the former driver.

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Sunrisecc: Already tried Device Manager but neither the old/replaced board nor the old driver was listed. That’s the very first thing that I tried.

Ken Johnston: Yes that will work for MS Update BUT I really wanted to delete/get rid of the old driver(s) so there was no future conflict

Gerald Shepard: This looks like the best solution. Thank you, I’ll try it immediately and let y’all know how it works. Just for the record, I agree with your comments about CCleaner, in fact I already use it religiously to get rid of all those pesky temp files etc.

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As a related issue …
The reason I changed out the Graphics card is that it kept “cutting out” and I kept getting “Action Center Messages” that the NVIDIA Driver had “stopped working” (the actual problem was the GPU fan crapped out and the card overheated. I have since returned the card for warranty repair/replacement and meanwhile installed a new card).

Now for the related question … How do I get rid/delete/clear/erase all of those @#$% Action Center messages.

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Is your replacement card the same or similar line as your prior one?
NVIDIA will bunch drivers for multiple cards into one single-use driver.

Uninstall your current graphics card driver with a 3rd party app like revo or jv power tools and then reinstal it
with the updated one from the manufactures site, not the supplied disk.

I don’t know about action center, but this batch will clear the event viewer:

@echo off
FOR /F “tokens=1,2*” %%V IN (‘bcdedit’) DO SET adminTest=%%V
IF (%adminTest%)==(Access) goto noAdmin
for /F “tokens=*” %%G in (‘wevtutil.exe el’) DO (call :do_clear “%%G”)
echo.
echo Event Logs have been cleared! ^
goto theEnd
:do_clear
echo clearing %1
wevtutil.exe cl %1
goto :eof
:noAdmin
echo You must run this script as an Administrator!
echo ^
:theEnd
pause>NUL

I too have an “optional” update for my GT 8800, but I’m not having any problems with it so I
ignor the MS update. (hide it);
Right click on the update in question and choose “hide”.

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The following software has worked for me in the past.

http://www.guru3d.co…/driversweeper/

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