How To Remove Old Hidden Device Drivers From Windows 11

How To Remove Old Hidden Device Drivers From Windows 11
Today I will show you how to detect and remove old unused or hidden device drivers in Windows 11. You can use this method on any windows operating system. Every hardware attached to your Windows computer will show up in Device Manager as an installed device. These devices need drivers to work correctly and sometimes these old drivers need to be removed from the computer. I will show you a few ways on how to uninstall these old unused device drivers.

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[Britec]

Hope this video helps, drop us a LIKE 👍

[OttoOhlberger]

finally thank you this actually helped me delete these outdated logitech drivers

[pascalmorin]

Thanks! I had a BSOD when I was pluging in my external hard drive (My Passeport) You showed me how to remove its driver and now it works perfectly! Thanks again!

[aivez]

Another great video, Brian. So basically any drivers that are faded/transparent (with 'show hidden devices' on) listed under any of the device types (storage devices, system devices, and all the rest of them) are safe to uninstall? I have a faded/transparent driver that is under the 'Universal Serial Bus controllers' that is called 'Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed)', and I was wondering whether it would be safe enough to uninstall that?

[louf]

1:41 What about the Portable Devices area: I occasionally have run across drives that get their letters changed. Could I delete these and let it try to get back to an original long-standing order?

[J-Ernie]

They is a tool called DeviceCleanup which will remove all unused drivers from the device manager that I use, it doesn't need installation either.

[johngoard]

Hmm, Brian good video again and I suppose this would be an idea to do this before upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 - or not?? Could you also remove old drivers and then re-install a newer updated one because as I think you have mentioned in the past that the Windows system of assessing the installed driver is not really that good at getting the freshest one as I often get driver updates from Intel for example to install the latest drive?

[scoopjeff]

Try program GhostBuster: remove ghosted devices on Windows

[adamo]

Sometimes Windows can switch between drivers to use the ones with newest release date, but they are not always working correctly. To get rid of them you will have to remove device, check the box for removing driver software too, and then replug the device - other driver should be applied automatically. If you want to get rid of other drivers, that are not used currently by the device, you will have to switch to those drivers, remove them and replug the device.

[ChadeGB]

To add a little more to this, Device Manager doesn't show all devices that aren't presently connected to the system, to make it do this you open a Cmd prompt as an administrator by right clicking on the cmd prompt icon and choosing Run As Administrator, then type in this command:

set

Second, ALWAYS run DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) in safe mode, if you don't the program cannot delete all the display driver files that are currently loaded and in use by Windows, Windows may also try to start installing/restoring it's drivers too when it notices your drivers getting delted and so may cause a BSOD. Safe mode ensures that only the Basic MS driver is loaded and so you can safely delete the Nvidia/AMD/Intel drivers. It's recommended to use the Nvidia/AMD/Intel uninstaller first as you would normally and then reboot into safe mode and cleanup any leftovers with DDU. You can also use DDU to stop Windows downloading drivers from Windows update by clicking the box under the "Select Device Type" drop down box. Once you've installed your new drivers, you can open DDU again and re-enable that option if you wish.

[seanb]

Going to the System 32 folder was my only fix but thank you!

[outdoormatt]

Thankyou mate, can you do a video on how to format a drive that is write protected with Seagate tools its been password protected and is encrypted. Cheers

[xkorbekx]

can you do a video on how to export drivers and migrate them to new pc? printer and old monitor drivers are headache

[louf]

Seems great watching here. Intimidating opening my own DevMgr.

[ethimself]

Question: Is it best to leave well enough alone? Or delete the mmmm, highlighted drivers as in manually? Windows 10 Pro. Some time ago my System Restore stopped working and not want to find out if it is still not working - I actually got an Error Code that was specifically for a Windows 10 Update. Many hours spent in MS/Windows and internet trying to figure this out to no likely avail. Again as I got carried away - best to leave well enough alone? Many thanks and as always 👍👍

[sta.josefaagusandelsur]

I started making soft recently, I was wondering if you wanna do any features.

[daneo]

I went to turn on my uh9 mini PC & it tried to self repair and I got a message saying that there is no OS but it has windows 11 working fine yesterday and I don't have a bootable USB drive to fix it any advice 🤦🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️✌🏼

[carlgrove]

I'm more interested in how to install drivers that actually work! Since getting a Windows 10 computer, and having encountered more blue screens of death on it than on all my previous computers put together many times over, I have another problem regarding my printer/scanner, a Canon. It refuses to work with Windows 10 so if I need to do printing or scanning I have to get out my old Windows 7 model and use that. On several occasions I have seriously contemplated installing Windows 7 on the new computer. Frankly aside from speed I can see no reason for preferring Windows 10 over 7, and the file and folder system of the latter is far superior to that of 10.

[fernandozornosa]

great piece of software to erase that junk, thanks

[delixwtf]

How do ik which one too delete? I don’t wanna delete the wrong driver