Tune up Windows: Drivers

Squeeze the maximum possible performance from Windows and cut down your system clutter in minutes by getting rid of redundant drivers

Posted March 8th, 2011 - Post a comment - Share This

Just about every PC optimisation guide will recommend you uninstall unwanted programs to save resources. Some will also suggest disabling any unnecessary Windows services. This is sensible advice, but if you stop there you’ll be ignoring a huge amount of clutter.
Drivers are installed by devices and many applications, but they’re often left behind if you unplug the hardware or uninstall the program. Applications often install their own Windows services too, without you even realising. Most optimisation guides won’t cover these because they’re not standard Windows services, but if you’re looking to get the most from your PC then it may be worth removing some of them.
Culling these will only deliver minimal benefits. Removing failed (or multiple) driver installations can make your PC more stable though, and there’s little more annoying than when you need to remove or replace a driver, but Windows keeps reinstalling it. Knowing how to kill a driver for good can be very useful.

Device Manager

The simplest way to begin culling unwanted drivers is with Device Manager (see below). Of course ‘simple’ isn’t always best, at least in this case: removing the wrong drivers can cause problems that might prevent your PC booting, even in safe mode. Don’t try this unless you have a backup, and enough bootable recovery tools
to cope if something goes wrong.
For another view on your drivers, open a command window (right-click the ‘cmd.exe’ window and select ‘Run as administrator’ in Windows Vista or 7), and enter the command pnputil -e. This will display all your third-party drivers – everything you and your installed apps have added to Windows.

For a detailed view of your installed drivers, launch ‘MSINFO32.EXE’, expand the ‘Software Environment’ section and click ‘System drivers’.

For the most part, these won’t be doing any harm beyond occupying a little hard drive space and maybe a few Registry references. If you find a driver that you know isn’t system-critical and you want to delete it (so you can reinstall it more easily, perhaps), make a note of its ‘Published name’ and enter the command pnputil -d oem12.
inf, where ‘oem12.inf’ is replaced by the file name on your system.
If Windows tells you the device is in use, you can force deletion with the -f switch like this: pnputil -f -d oem12.inf. You need to be sure that Windows can cope without it.
Third-party services are easier to review. Just launch ‘MSCONFIG.EXE’, click ‘Services’, check ‘Hide all Microsoft services’ and look for items you don’t need. Apple Mobile Device and Bonjour Service, installed with iTunes, are good examples. If you don’t have an iPod, iPhone or other Apple device and don’t use Bonjour (a network
discovery tool), they’re unnecessary.
If you spot something like this that’s running and you’re sure you don’t need it, launch the Services applet (‘services.msc’), then find and double-click it for more information. If you’re positive that the service is unnecessary, set its ‘Startup type’ to ‘Disabled’ to turn it off when you next reboot.

Clean up your system with Device Manager

If you suspect that your PC is suffering driver problems, launch the Device Manager tool from Control Panel (or run ‘devmgmt.msc’directly). If a device has a problem, its section will be expanded and it’ll be highlighted with a yellow exclamation mark.
Double-click the faulty driver, click the ‘Driver’ tab and use the ‘Update driver’, ‘Disable’ or ‘Uninstall’ button to solve the problem. Device Manager won’t show you all the drivers installed on your PC by default, but a quick tweak will change that and you’ll soon be removing any unwanted junk.

1 Setup

Right-click ‘Computer’, select ‘Properties’ and click ‘Advanced (system settings) | Environment variables | New’. Enter DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES for your variable name, 1 for the value and click ‘New | OK’.

2 Hunt for junk

Launch Device Manager, click ‘View | Show hidden devices’ and you’ll see a ‘Non-plug and play drivers’ section. Expand this to see leftovers from past installations (we found 13 McAfee drivers on a PC with no McAfee software).

3 Clean up

If you see a device that relates to something you’ve uninstalled (and nothing else), its icon is greyed out and your system is backed up in case of problems, then you can remove it. Right-click the entry and select ‘Uninstall | OK’.