That’s provided to help users revert to an earlier version of the driver, should the current one prove unstable. If you remove all drivers except for the most recent one(s), you will not be able to use the Roll Back Driver option in the Properties window for the related device in Device Manager. Warning! There's an important downside to consider when removing elements from the driver store. Thus, this article focuses on investigating the contents of that driver store and removing older and/or obsolete items to reduce its on-disk footprint. Note that the driver-handling process as documented says nothing about cleaning up older drivers present in the Windows driver store (in %SystemRoot%\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository). The tool I recommend in this story won’t show it to you. Note: if you want to find this nnn number for any driver in the store (known as an index), you must use NirSoft’s excellent DriverView. cat files are deposited in the driver store associated with a DIID that takes the form of oem nnn.inf, where nnn represents a one- to three-digit decimal number. Installation proceeds in two steps: (a) The third-party driver installer imports a driver package into the driver store, and (b) the OS performs the actual driver installation, using the Drvinst.exe process (the executable for which resides in %SystemRoot%\System32\).Mostly, this involves accessing such files from the local file system (or media like a CD or DVD) at the user's direction. The Hardware Installation Wizard uses Setup and CfgMgr (Configuration Manager) API functions to locate INF files that correspond to drivers that are compatible with the detected device.(If not, this activity will be deferred until an admin-level user next logs in.) For installers that involve posting of dialog boxes requiring user input, the PnP manager executes a Hardware Installation Wizard to oversee such task(s) if the logged-in user has admin privileges. The user-mode PnP manager tries to perform an automatic install without user input or intervention.When it fails to find one, it tells the user-mode PnP manager about that device using its DIID. The PnP manager checks the registry for a corresponding function driver.A bus driver informs the PnP manager about a device it discovers during enumeration using a device instance identifier (DIID).My information comes courtesy of the terrific Microsoft Press book Windows Internals (7 th edition in 2 volumes, as of this writing). These are purpose-built to announce themselves to Windows so that it can assist in finding a device driver to use, if not always the latest and greatest instance. For this discussion, I'll stick to so-called Plug and Play (PnP) devices. This is actually quite a fascinating process and involves a lot of behind-the-scenes action in Windows. What happens when you install a Windows driver? In fact, the Intel DSA is spectacularly good at adding to driver bloat, as you’ll see later in the story.Īll those unnecessary drivers eat up storage space and may slow down your system, so it’s good PC maintenance practice to clear out the driver cruft. Thus, while every driver update tool that I know of helps keep drivers up to date, they do nothing to relieve driver bloat. Neither vendor-specific nor vendor-agnostic update tools remove old drivers as they cheerfully add new ones. The Intel and Nvidia offerings concentrate on devices they make, whereas general-purpose driver update tools check all of them and point you at drivers in need of updating, with varying degrees of help and support in getting them installed. Those who pursue driver currency more vigorously may also use tools like the Intel Driver
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