Remove Old and Useless Drivers from the Windows Driver Store

When you install or update device drivers in Windows, older versions of the drivers remain on the system drive. This allows the user to roll back to a previous driver version if the new driver is unstable. However, Windows doesn’t automatically remove old and useless versions of drivers, so over time, the amount of space occupied by drivers on the system drive becomes quite large. In this article, we will look at several ways to remove obsolete and old versions of drivers (duplicates) in Windows using built-in and third-party tools.

Windows stores all driver files in its driver repository (Driver Store) located in the %WINDIR%\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository.

You can get the driver store directory size with PowerShell ( "{0:N2} GB" -f ((gci –force $Env:windir\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository –Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue| measure Length -s).sum / 1Gb) ) or graphic tools. On my home Windows laptop, the FileRepository directory takes up about 11 GB of disk space and contains over 5,000 files. There are over 20 different versions of the NVIDIA video graphic driver stored in this directory.

How to Find and Remove Old Drivers in Windows with PowerShell

Let’s look at how to find out and remove old versions of drivers in Windows. You can display a complete list of installed drivers using PowerShell and WMI (CIM) class Win32_PnPSignedDriver:

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPSignedDriver| select DeviceName, DeviceClass,Manufacturer, DriverVersion, DriverDate,InfName|Out-GridView

In my example, I got an Out-GridView table with a list of drivers in the Windows repository in the format: device name, device class, manufacturer, driver version, installation date, driver inf file name (oemXXX.inf).

You can get a list of third-party drivers installed on Windows using the Get-WindowsDriver cmdlet:

Get-WindowsDriver –Online| select Driver, ClassName, BootCritical, ProviderName, Date, Version, OriginalFileName|Out-GridView

You can remove any of the installed drivers using the pnputil CLI tool:

pnputil.exe /remove-device oemxxx.inf

Look in the table for drivers that have multiple versions and remove all older versions of the driver (except the latest one) using pnputil.exe.

You can also export the list of installed drivers to a text file and then import it into Excel:

dism /online /get-drivers /format:table > c:\tmp\drivers.txt

Delete all unnecessary data in the table and leave only the following columns: the driver file in the system (oemXXX.inf), the name of the source INF file, device class, manufacturer, installation date, and driver version. Sort this table by column B (containing the name of the original INF file) and column F (driver installation date). Among the drivers with the same name, mark for removal all driver versions except the last one. In my case, you can see that most old drivers are referred to the NVIDIA video adapter.

To make it more convenient, let’s create an additional column with the command to uninstall each driver using the simple formula: =CONCATENATE("pnputil.exe -d ";A21)

Copy and run the pnputil commands in the command prompt or a BAT file.

pnputil.exe –d oem9.inf
Microsoft PnP Utility
Driver package deleted successfully

In my case, I deleted about 40 old versions of drivers in Windows and cleared about 8 GB of space (mostly due to removing NVIDIA video card drivers).

You can use the RemoveOldDuplicateDrivers.ps1 PowerShell script to automatically find device drivers that have multiple driver versions (duplicates) installed. (https://github.com/maxbakhub/winposh/blob/main/WindowsDesktopManagement/RemoveOldDuplicateDrivers.ps1 ).

The script will display a list of old driver versions that can be removed because newer versions are installed. The lines with automatic removal actions of found drivers are commented out in the script by default.

Delete Old Drivers in Windows using the Disk Cleanup Tool

In current versions of Windows 10 and 11, you can use the built-in cleanmgr.exe (Disk Cleanup tool) to clean up the Driverstore Filerepository folder.

1. Run the Disk Cleanup: Win+R -> cleanmgr;
2. Select the system drive;
3. Click Clean up system files;
4. Check Device driver packages in the list;
5. Click OK;
6. This cleanup task will remove all previous versions of drivers installed through Windows Update or manually. Only the latest version for each of the drivers will remain in Windows DriverStore. However, you should be aware that the “Roll back driver” button in the Driver Properties tab of Device Manager will become inactive.
   The cleanmgr task only removes duplicate versions of drivers. Unused device drivers should be removed manually.

Removing Unused Drivers with DevManView

You can use a small free tool DevManView (by NirSoft) to view and manage the list of installed drivers in the Windows Driver Store.

DevManView is an excellent alternative to the standard Windows Device Manager MMC snap-in and allows you to present a list of drivers installed on your computer as a flat list (table).

1. Download and run the DevManView tool;
2. Enable the following items in the Options menu: Mark Connected Devices and Show Non-Plug and Play Drivers;
3. Sort the table by the Connected column. This will allow you to see which devices are currently connected and which are not;
4. We recommend you disable the selected device drivers first (Disable Selected Devices –> F6) and only after restarting the computer, remove the drivers using the Uninstall Selected Devices option.