How to Remove Old (Unused) Drivers from the Windows Driver Store

When installing or updating device drivers in Windows, old driver versions remain on the system. This allows the user to roll back to a previous driver version if the new driver is unstable. Because Windows doesn’t automatically remove old and unused driver versions, 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.

How to Safely Clean Up the FileRepository Folder in DriverStore

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

When installing new device drivers, Windows doesn’t remove old versions from this directory (including during automatic driver updates, which are enabled in Windows by default). The most common cause of a sharp increase the size of the DriverStore is frequent driver updates for NVIDIA and AMD graphics adapters, Realtek sound cards, and other hardware. For example, a single version of a GPU driver can be several gigabytes in size. Therefore, the size of the FileRepository directory can grow to several tens of gigabytes over time.

You can use PowerShell to find out the size of the DriverStore directory ( "{0:N2} GB" -f ((gci –force $Env:windir\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository –Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue| measure Length -s).sum / 1Gb) ) or graphic tools (for example, WinDirStat).

On my home Windows laptop, the FileRepository directory takes up about 11 GB of disk space and contains over 5,000 files. This directory contains over 20 different versions of the NVIDIA graphics driver.

You can safely clean up the contents of the FileRepository folder by removing old and unused driver versions, but this must be done correctly to avoid crashing the system.

Delete Old Drivers in Windows using the Disk Cleanup Tool

The safest way to remove old drivers from the Driver Store is to use the Disk Cleanup tool (CleanMgr), which comes built-in to all versions of Windows, including Windows 10 and 11.

1. Run 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 driver 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 driver versions. Unused device drivers should be removed manually.

How to Find and Remove Old Drivers in Windows with PowerShell

Let’s look at how to manually find and remove old driver versions 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 containing a list of drivers from the Windows Driver Store in the following format: device name, device class, manufacturer, driver version, release date, driver INF file name (oemXXX.inf).

The previous command lists all the available drivers on a computer, including the built-in system drivers from Microsoft. You can list only third-party drivers installed in Windows:

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

To uninstall a driver in Windows, use the built-in pnputil CLI command. Specify the name of the INF driver file to be removed in the command argument.

pnputil.exe /delete-driver oemxxx.inf

Check the table for drivers with multiple versions, then use the pnputil.exe command to remove all the older versions (identify the old drivers by their version number and/or release date).

To make it easier to analyze and find older driver versions, it is convenient to export the list of installed drivers to a text file and import it into Excel:

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

Remove all unnecessary data from the table, leaving only the following columns: system INF driver file name (oemXXX.inf), original INF file name, device class, manufacturer, release date, and driver version. Sort this table by column B (containing the original .INF file name) and column F (driver release 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)

Run the resulting pnputil commands by copying them into an elevated 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 from the Windows driver store and cleared about 8 GB of space (mostly due to removing NVIDIA graphics 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 once newer driver versions have been installed for these devices. You can check the found oemXXX.inf driver files manually (check the internal driver name in the PublishedName column) and then delete them using the pnputil command. By default, the line with automatic removal actions against found drivers is commented out in the script.

Removing Unused Drivers with Driver Store Explorer

A free, small utility called Driver Store Explorer (also known as RAPR) can be used to view the list of installed drivers in Windows. This open-source utility can be downloaded from GitHub (https://github.com/lostindark/DriverStoreExplorer). It is easy to install in Windows using the built-in package manager (WinGet):

winget install lostindark.DriverStoreExplorer

To launch Driver Store Explorer, run the command:

rapr.exe

The tool will display a list of all the drivers that are currently installed. It is convenient that you can sort installed drivers by size by clicking the “Size” column header.

To automatically find and highlight only old driver versions, click the Select Old Drivers button on the right pane. To delete them all at once, click the Delete Drivers button.

Before removing a driver, you can export it to a local folder.