Help For The Harried

In the past year or so, it seems that nVidia has, for some users, become as big a problem with their drivers as ATi has always been. Writing device drivers has always been more or less a black art, but lately, it seems that the old wizards have not passed the magic to the newest members of the team.

My son is constantly complaining about the nVidia drivers for the card he uses on one of my machines. While I firmly believe that “flavor of the month” drivers is a bad concept in total, both nVidia and ATi continue the practice.

While I favor Revo Uninstaller for programs, I have it on good authority that Driver Sweeper is the best way to deal with the uninstall of video drivers, which makes sure that driver contamination is not your problem, along with poor quality of programming in new drivers.

• from gHacks

Our last review of Driver Sweeper dates back to March where we reviewed version 1.5.5 of the system software (read: Device Driver Cleanup) that can be used to uninstall drivers completely from the operating system. . The developer has been busy in the past months releasing several new versions of the system driver uninstaller. Driver Sweeper 2.1 was released yesterday by the developer.

The interface itself was revamped a bit but has not changed a lot otherwise. Driver Sweeper is still offering the functionality to remove specific system drivers from a Windows operating system. The supported drivers that can be removed are from Ati, Nvidia, Creative, Microsoft, and Realtek.

The user can select one or multiple of the supported manufacturers in the main menu. A click on the Analyse button will start the system scan which results in a display of all files, folders and Registry entries related to those drivers.

All or only some of these items can then be cleaned from the computer system. The main intention of Driver Sweeper is to act as a driver cleanup after the official driver uninstallation. It can also be handy if a driver cannot be uninstalled with the uninstaller provided by the driver manufacturer.

Driver Sweeper 2.1 comes with improved cleaning algorithms and full Windows 7 support. This version (actually version 2.0) has been rewritten from scratch. It does require the Microsoft .net Framework 3.0 now to be installed before it can be installed or executed.

Interested users can download the latest version of Driver Sweeper at the developer’s website.

After using Driver Sweeper, you can usually be insured that the new driver you install will be the only revision on your machine. Then you only have to worry about the fitness for purpose of the drivers you install.

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