If you’ve just upgraded your computer to the latest hardware device, then it is recommended to remove the driver files for the old hardware. Because if you don’t remove old Windows drivers from your system, you may encounter problems such as system instability, startup problems, slowdowns, driver conflicts and system crashes. Sometime after you’ve uninstalled the drivers, there are still leftover files on your system. This is when Driver Sweeper comes in handy.
Driver Sweeper is a freeware Windows application that helps you to completely remove old Windows drivers from your system with just a few clicks. FYI, I’ve reviewed this driver removal tool (running version 1.5.5) back in 2009. Now, Driver Sweeper is running version 3.2. So we think that it’s worth a review again. 🙂
In the main screen, you should notice a list of supported drivers for removal. There are 16 of them including hardware manufacturers like AMD, NVIDIA, ASUS, Microsoft, Realtek and more. To run a scan for driver leftover files, simply check the hardware driver(s) that you want to remove. Then, hit the “Analyse” button.
Driver Sweeper will return a list of leftover files. All the driver entries are checked for removal by default. Click on the “Clean” button to remove them. After successful removal, you will be prompted to reboot the system.
On top of that, a backup of the drivers you selected for removal is automatically created, in case you want to restore all the removed driver entries.
Driver Sweeper is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista and 7 operating systems, with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 or higher installed.
