Remove Old Nvidia Drivers
Download drivers for NVIDIA products including GeForce graphics cards, nForce motherboards, Quadro workstations, and more. Update your graphics card drivers today. How to Uninstall Nvidia Drivers. NVIDIA develops software drivers for Windows PCs that control graphics cards and graphics processing units (GPUs). In the event you want to install a new GPU from another manufacturer or simply uninstall.
If you’re a gamer (or just a PC user) with NVIDIA graphics, NVIDIA’s drivers are probably wasting gigabytes of storage on your hard drive. NVIDIA leaves old installer files buried on your hard drive until you get annoyed and manually delete them…if you even realize you need to.
- Jul 29, 2017 Among the drivers with the same name mark for removal all driver versions except the last one. In my case, you can see that the most part of old drivers are refer to the NVIDIA video adapter. To delete a driver, you can use pnputil command: pnputil.exe -d oemxxx.inf.
- Jun 07, 2017 DDU allows you to easily completely uninstall and clean out your PC of old GPU drivers. One of the main scripts it runs will uninstall drivers, uninstall any.
- GeForce Experience driver installation failed. How do I manually install the NVIDIA driver for my graphics card? Users may be running a program in the background that inteferes with the installation. If Windows is performing a background Windows Update, a driver installation may also fail. This articles provides step by steps instructions for removing the NVIDIA display driver and then manually install the driver.
As someone who’s used NVIDIA graphics hardware for years, this has been annoying me for a very long time. I’ve seen these files use over 4 GB of space, and, while that may sound like a small amount of space to some, it’s a lot of wasted space on a smaller SSD. And you’ll probably only notice it if you use a disk space analysis tool.
Update: NVIDIA reached out to us with some new information. In GeForce Experience 3.9.0, NVIDIA added a cleanup tool that will automatically remove old driver versions. NVIDIA now only keeps installers for the current and previous version of the driver, which will be about 1 GB in total.
NVIDIA also said they plan to add a “Revert to prior driver” feature in a future version of GeForce Experience. That’s why NVIDIA stores these files on your hard drive.
Where These Files Are Stored
RELATED:The Four Best Free Tools to Analyze Hard Drive Space on Your Windows PC
At the moment, NVIDIA stores these graphics driver installation files at C:ProgramDataNVIDIA CorporationDownloader. The ProgramData directory is hidden by default, so you have to either view hidden files or type C:ProgramData
into your file manager’s location bar to go there.
To see exactly how much space these files are using on your PC, open the NVIDIA Corporation directory here, right-click the “Downloader” folder, and select “Properties”.
In the screenshot below, these files are only using 1.4 GB of space on our test system. However, that’s just because we cleared these files out a few months ago. We’ve seen this folder balloon much larger in the past.
Previous versions of the NVIDIA software stored these driver installation files at C:Program FilesNVIDIA CorporationInstaller2, C:ProgramDataNVIDIA CorporationNetService, and just under the C:NVIDIA folder. If you haven’t reinstalled Windows or deleted these files in a while, they may still be stored in these folders. We’re not sure if NVIDIA’s software ever deletes them.
What Are They?
If you open the Downloader folder, you’ll see a number of folders with random-looking names. Double-click one of these folders, and you’ll see exactly what’s inside: NVIDIA driver updates in .exe form.
Basically, whenever NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software downloads a driver update, it stores a full copy of that update’s installer here. Even after the driver is successfully installed, the installers are left here.
The “latest” folder stores an uncompressed copy of the latest driver update. This should only be needed during the driver installation process, and you’ll only need it again if you ever need to reinstall the latest driver.
Why Does NVIDIA Keep Them Around?
We reached out to NVIDIA to ask why GeForce Experience stores copies of all these installers in a folder like this, but NVIDIA didn’t respond.
RELATED:How to Recover From a Bad GPU Driver Update
We can imagine what these are for, however. If a driver update causes a problem, you can head to this folder to reinstall the previous driver update. They’re all here and ready to go, so you can easily revert to a previous driver without a long download if you have a problem.
That’s all well and good, but how often do users really need to revert graphics drivers? And wouldn’t it be better just to keep one or two of the most recent “good” drivers, rather than store 4 GB of drivers going back many versions? After all, even if a user needed to revert to an old driver, they could always download the old version from NVIDIA’s website. There’s no need to waste 4 GB of hard disk space “just in case”.
This makes even less sense when you consider that NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software does not make it easy to revert to another driver version. It doesn’t even tell users that these installers exist. Hardly anyone will ever find and run these, so why keep them around? If these files have to stick around, GeForce Experience should offer a way to manage them so users don’t need to dig into the ProgramData folder to free up space.
How to Delete Them
While the default Windows file permissions won’t let you delete the entire Downloader folder, we’ve found that you can simply open the Downloader folder and delete the “latest” folder and the other folders with random names. Leave the “config” folder and “status.json” file alone.
This will free up the space used by NVIDIA installer files on your system. However, when GeForce Experience downloads new driver files and installs them, those new driver files will be stored here until you delete them, too.
RELATED:CCleaner Was Hacked: What You Need to Know
CCleaner can also automatically erase these NVIDIA installer files. Messy installers that greedily consume disk space like this without giving users control are a big reason why so many Windows users end up running tools like CCleaner. If software developers behaved better, so many users wouldn’t have been in danger from the CCleaner hack.
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When you install or update device drivers in Windows, older driver versions are still stored in the system. Thus, a user can roll back to the previous driver version if the new driver is unstable (a useful opportunity, as in the case of rolling back a Wi-Fi driver). However, Windows does not automatically clean and delete old driver versions, so as the time goes the size of disk space occupied by drivers becomes quite large. In this article, we’ll discuss how to remove old driver versions (duplicates) using the integrated system tools (without any third-part software).
Windows stores all driver files in its driver repository (Driver Store) located in %WINDIR%System32DriverStoreFileRepository. In my case on my home laptop running Windows 7 (installed almost 8 years ago), FileRepository folder occupies about 11 GB and contains over 5,000 files. It’s a good many! In particular, over 20 Nvidia driver versions are stored here.
Important!- Never delete any files from DriverStore manually.
- Prior to clearing up the Driver Store, it is strongly recommended that you create a system restore point (
Checkpoint-Computer -Description 'BeforeDriversDelete'
) or back up your system image. - After cleaning the storage, you may have to download and install drivers manually if a new device is connected.
How to Find and Delete Old Driver Versions in Windows 7
Let’s see how to find and delete obsolete drivers in Windows 7. (In Windows 8 and Windows 10, easier ways to delete old drivers are used, these are described below).
Get the list of all third-party drivers available in the system and export them to a text file. To do it, run the following command in the command prompt with the administrator privileges:
dism /online /get-drivers /format:table > c:tmpdrivers.txt
Import this text file into Excel, and delete all odd data in a way that only the table containing the list of drivers in the repository is left. The table should contain the number of the driver in the system (oemXXX.inf), the name of the original INF file, device class, manufacturer, installation date and driver version.
Sort this table by column B (containing the name of the original INF file) and column F (driver installation date). Among the drivers with the same name mark for removal all driver versions except the last one. In my case, you can see that the most part of old drivers are refer to the NVIDIA video adapter.
To delete a driver, you can use pnputil command:
pnputil.exe -d oemxxx.inf
pnputil -f -d oemxxx.inf
To make it more convenient, we will create in the empty column the commands to remove each driver using the formula: =CONCATENATE('pnputil.exe -d ';A21)
Copy and run these commands in the command prompt or a BAT file.
pnputil.exe –d oem9.inf
Microsoft PnP Utility
Driver package deleted successfully
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Thus, I have deleted about 40 old driver versions and freed about 8 GB of space (mostly due to removing of NVIDIA drivers).
How to Delete Old Drivers in Windows 10/8 Using Disk Cleanup
In Windows 10 / 8.1, there is a more convenient tool to delete earlier driver versions — familiar Disk Cleanup tool (cleanmgr.exe) that also allows to delete deprecated updates.
- Run Disk Cleanup: Win+R -> cleanmgr
- Select the system disk
- Click Clean up system files
- Check Device driver packages in the listNote. In my system the size of stored driver copies is 0. In real systems it is likely to be different
- Click OK
Old Nvidia Geforce Drivers
Cleanmgr will delete all old unused driver versions. However, you should understand that the Roll back driver button in Driver Properties tab of Device Manage will become inactive.