Unless you are  very new to using Windows, you will know that Microsoft has made enormous strides in driver management over the decades.  The Driver Roll Back feature has saved our butts a few times.  However, there is still one area that is seriously lacking and that is the removal of old or unused drivers.

Fortunately someone with the affable moniker LostInTheDark wrote a dandy freeware utility to manage the Windows driver store and posted it HERE on Microsoft GitHub.

Driver Store Explorer free program to automatically find and delete old driver files

DriverStore Explorer runs as a portable app so it does not require installation.  After you double click on RAPR.EXE the program starts, asks for Admin rights and then scans the driver store (which is at C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository).  Next, just you can simply click the SELECT OLD DRIVER(S) button on the right; let it run for a few seconds and then click DELETE DRIVERS.

Note that you may have to select FORCE DELETION if drivers are still in use.  You may ask yourself how an old driver could still be in use and the answer is ‘driver rollback’.  Windows flags old drivers as being in use if Device Manager has a rollback option for the device in question.

You can then sort by NAME, DRIVER CLASS or PROVIDER, select all the of the drivers you think should be deleted manually.  Then just click DELETE, reboot and hope all is well.


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