It’s very important to remove your drivers on a proper way, because driver leftovers can cause problems like stability and startup problems. I remembered many years ago I encountered a problem where I change from S3 graphics card to Nvidia. I installed the new drivers and after a reboot, all I got was a blank black screen. Then I tried booting into Safe Mode and I was able to get in. I immediately suspected that it has something to do with a driver file that auto loads on Windows startup.
I ran “msconfig” and found a S3 file being loaded whenever Windows is booted up. I removed that startup entry and I was able to boot in to Windows as normal.
If you’re a novice computer user, I understand that it might be a little too confusing for you to troubleshoot driver problems. So here’s a great tool for removing leftovers driver from your system.
Guru3D – Driver Sweeper is a fast tool to remove driver leftovers from your system.
Driver Sweeper is only able to support drivers from NVIDIA (Display and Chipset), ATI (Display), Creative (Sound), Realtek (Sound), Ageia (PhysX) and Microsoft (Mouse). Although not much of driver is supported, but it can cover a lot of graphics card because a lot of people are either using NVIDIA or ATI video adapter.
All the settings are saved in an ini file. Nothing is created in the registry, so it’s possible to use it as a portable program. Log files can be saved to the harddisk and viewed as well. You can find the logs under the Tools menu.
The recommended way to use Driver Sweeper:
1. Use the official uninstaller(s) of the driver(s) you want to uninstall.
2. Use Driver Sweeper and select what to clean.
3. Press the clean button.
4. Reboot your PC.
Very useful, small and portable free tool. Driver Sweeper is tested on Windows 2000, XP and Vista on both 32-bit and 64-bit. Remember, this is not a tool to UNINSTALL your driver. It is a tool to remove LEFTOVERS files AFTER driver uninstallation.