Xp drivers uninstall

To get rid of unwanted drivers, devices, or services, use the following steps: 1 Open the Start menu and choose Run. Note that nothing seems to happen. This is expected.

You are actually setting an environment variable which is going to help you to see hidden devices. This will launch the Windows Device Manager Console.

As you expand the different drivers and devices in the device manager, you will see not only the items that Windows currently detects as installed on your PC; but you will also see drivers, devices, and services which have been loaded in the past but were not uninstalled or are not currently started. You can find your offending device, right-click, and choose uninstall to remove it from the system completely. Only remove items you know you do not need.

Be careful that you do not change too many devices, or you might need to re-activate your Windows installation. Here are step-by-step instructions on how you can view and remove these unnecessary devices.

When you install a device driver on a Windows XP machine, the operating system loads that driver each time the computer boots regardless of whether the device is present—unless you specifically uninstall the driver. This means that drivers from devices that you have long since removed from your system may be wasting valuable system resources. Automatically sign up today! Greg Shultz is a freelance Technical Writer. Previously, he has worked as Documentation Specialist in the software industry, a Technical Support Specialist in educational industry, and a Technical Journalist in the computer publishing industry.

Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button. Click the New button below the System Variables panel. I need to revert the drivers. However, rollback does not work something about the drivers weren't backed up and manually selecting the older driver is futile as XP just ignores it, stating, in its infinite wisdom, that the current driver is better and so I'd have no reason to want to use the older driver.

I have done some research and can't seem to find a definite answer so I think this will be of help to plenty of others as well. Windows uses a number of factors to decide what is the "best" driver, such as hardware ID matching INFs that match more specific hardware IDs are "better" , driver date, driver version, and whether the driver is signed.

How Setup Selects Drivers has the details if you're interested. If not, you should be able to manually choose the older driver by right-clicking on the device in Device Manager, selecting "Update Driver I will choose the driver to install", etc.

Or did you already try that? As well as selecting "Uninstall If all else fails, you might have some success using the devcon command that ships with the Windows Driver Kit. There's also an older version of devcon available for direct download the WDK is pretty large. If you resort to manually deleting the driver's.

Here are some good pointers for uninstalling pesky. Something to try if your driver uses a. First, open device manager as administrator, right click on device and choose properties, on driver tab, click on details, and you would get the. How to know the name of the driver to look for isn't explained there, remember that it's the same as the.

If the. A caller of this function must have administrative privileges, otherwise the function fails. Hmm, I booted into safe mode and managed to resolve this by making sure I uninstalled the device and interrupted XP before it tried automatically reinstalling it when I scanned for hardware changes.

Still interested in how to remove a driver from being detected in automatic driver install though. Sign up to join this community.

The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.