![display driver cleaner display driver cleaner](https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/old-graphics-card-1.jpg)
RELATED: Do You Need to Worry About Updating Your Desktop Programs? They then installed the new graphics drivers and rebooted Windows once again.ĭrivers didn’t intelligently handle the update process - users had to run the uninstaller manually and users who never ran driver cleaners occasionally ran into problems when NVIDIA or ATI’s uninstaller failed to remove the previous driver files completely. Users uninstalled their existing graphics drivers, rebooted their Windows computers into low-resolution VGA mode, and often ran a driver cleaner to make sure the old drivers were completely removed. There was a time when NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD) instructed their users to uninstall their existing graphics drivers before installing the new drivers.
![display driver cleaner display driver cleaner](https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Display-Driver-Uninstaller.jpg)
In the past, driver cleaners were much more popular utilities. A driver cleaner automates this last part - after the driver is uninstalled, the driver cleaner will look for leftover files and delete them for you. If you were worried about running into driver conflicts when upgrading, you could uninstall the driver using its standard uninstaller and then go through your system, uninstalling the hardware device and deleting the leftover driver files by hand. Conflicting driver files could result in crashes, slow-downs, and other glitches. This could cause problems, as these driver files were never designed to work together. If the uninstaller failed to remove all the old driver files, you might end up with driver files from two different versions lying around. For example, perhaps you were upgrading your NVIDIA or AMD graphics driver to the latest version. When you uninstall the existing hardware driver, the uninstaller could fail to clean up properly and leave some of these files behind.
#DISPLAY DRIVER CLEANER INSTALL#
When you install something like the NVIDIA or AMD graphics drivers, the installer leaves a variety of individual driver files all over your system. Hardware drivers aren’t just self-contained pieces of software.