How to remove old & unused device drivers in Windows 7

[Nibiru2008]

From: The Windows Club.com

By Windows Club | April 23rd, 2010

If you find that some of your newly installed devices are not working correctly or in fact your Windows computer freezes frequently, you might want to consider remove old & unused device drivers in Windows.

To do so:

Open Start Menu and right click on Computer and select Properties.
From the left side panel, click on Advanced system settings and click on Environment Variables.

Now under the User variables box, click on New and type
devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices
in the Variable Name text box & 1 in the Variable Value box. This will set a flag to allow you to now view unused devices.

Now type devmgmt.msc in start search and hit Enter to open the Device Manager.

Click View tab and select Show hidden devices. Expand the branches in the device tree & look for the faded icons. These indicate unused device drivers.

Right click on it and select Uninstall.

That’s it!


SOURCE

[Phelon]

Wow, this is veryyy neat haha. Works a charm. Thanks!

[fredmxm354]

Brilliant, done this and removed over 70 ghost devices :O i wonder what effect all those were having on my system :|

[championn]

awesome ! removed many unused ones . thank you