How to: Remove your Nvidia GPU Drivers. - Page 3

Ahh okie doke, thanks .

Here's my instructions for updating drivers in any scenario except when you swap ATI/NV cards, or rollback to old drivers:

1) Run the latest driver package, selecting 'Clean Install' option,
2) Reboot when it's done, even though you may not be told to,
3) Game On!

I been doing this for like 10 years (which means literally hundreds and hundreds of times) every time I install newer drivers (and prior to the 'Clean Install' option in the Forceware, I simply uninstalled the current drivers first via CP and restarted before installing the newest drivers).

It has literally never failed to work 100% perfectly for me.

The only reason I'd ever resort to anything more complicated (such as the instructions in this thread) is if I was switching from ATI to nV, OR if I wanted to install an OLD driver package, one that I knew was fundamentally different like a 100-series driver vs. a 200-series driver.

And Bradley, it's the forum Editors that decide stickies, not the Moderators. I don't recall who's section this is, but I believe it's this gentleman.

Edit: I would also add that if you REALLY and truly want to get rid of your nV drivers completely from a particular install (call it install 1), you ALSO need to have a separate install (install 2) that you can boot into. From install 2, you then have to go into the system32 folder of install 1 and remove the all the files named nv* that have nVidia corporation as their author.

In my experience, these files, which are your ACTUAL in-use driver files, cannot be removed if you're actually logged into the same install, not even in safe mode, and not even by driver sweeper

There's also I believe a drivercache folder somewhere in the Windows folder hierarchy that you'd have to remove the driver files from as well if you want to be 100% rid of them, but I believe if you do the uninstall through Forceware you remove the registry pointers to these files, so they should be basically rendered useless even w/o physically deleting them.

Well I did it and well my computer hasn't exploded once, let alone BSOD or crash when I benched it for a few hours. Also overclocked the card a bit and it is still stable, so I have to say THANKS!

I actually used your AMD driver removal method when I was switching from NV to AMD since this guide wasn't out at the time. Really helpful as driver sweeper has screwed me over too many times to keep track of.

This is the way to go. Installing a newer driver over an older version on my machine, no matter what version, it breaks my sli, to the point i can't enable it and only one card is used, i don't know why but every time this happens.
When i use this method and clean install, everything works fine.

Using driver cleaners actually forced me to reinstall windows during the bf3 beta.

You can add me as a testimonial ...

Sent from my AT&T Samsung Galaxy S2 using Tapatalk.

Will be giving this method a go later on today when my cards get back from RMA!