How To Update And Remove PC Drivers

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Updating your drivers and software sometimes can significantly improve the speed of your PC and software, as well as fixing old bugs or adding new functionality. Unfortunately, many manufacturers don’t build into their applications an auto-update process, so the only way to do this is manually.

I get around this by keeping a bookmarks folder on my PC where I store links to the sites for all my software and hardware. Then every month or so, I spend 30 mins upgrading all my software and drivers. This is a good habit to get into to keep your machine running smoothly and to stop problems happening further on down the line.

Remving old drivers properly is just as important. Sometimes hwhen you uninstall a device, the drivers may still be using valuable system resources. To ensure you don’t have any old drivers installed do the following:

1. Press [Windows]+[Break] to bring up the System Properties dialog box
2. Select the ‘Advanced tab’ and click ‘Environment Variables’
3. Click the ‘New’ button
4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type ‘devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices’ in the Variable Name text box and ‘ 1′ in the Variable Value text box.
5. Click ‘OK’ twice
6. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button
7. In Device Manager, go to View | Show Hidden Devices
8. Expand the various branches in the device tree and look for the washed out icons, which indicate unused device drivers
9. To remove an unused device driver, right-click the icon and select Uninstall

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