Now may be a good time to do some drivers cleaning job before preparing for a possible 26H2 release this Fall.

I do not know if this was mentioned elsewhere in the forum.

This is a problem every computer user should be facing.

After updating the drivers several times in my HP EliteBook 840 G5 from late 2018, I backed the drivers up and counted them.

There were a total of 113 drivers.



I found a command to clean unused and redundant drivers from the drivers store.

When one installs a new version of drivers, the previous version of drivers may also be kept in the drivers store.

The below command cleans the previous non-used drivers when run in a Command Prompt console with admin privileges:

rundll32.exe pnpclean.dll,RunDLL_PnpClean /DRIVERS /MAXCLEAN

After cleaning completed (by the way there is no sign that the cleaning job is done), I backed the drivers up and counted them again.



This time the total number of drivers went down to 47.

Size-wise, before cleaning the drivers occupied a space of 2.26 GB. After cleaning, the size went down to 1.87 GB.

If one wishes to integrate the drivers before clean installation of Windows, this will be a good move.

I hope you find this post useful.

Hi, good tool - RAPR - Driver Store Explorer. (free)

But on my old Win 10 machine, 9 year old O/S installation - it found hardly anything.

dalchina said:

Hi, good tool - RAPR - Driver Store Explorer. (free)

But on my old Win 10 machine, 9 year old O/S installation - it found hardly anything.
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Yep best tool for managing drivers and easy to use.

In this guide, we will look at Driver Store Explorer app to remove obsolete and old versions of drivers (duplicates) in Windows using third-party tools.

Driver Store Explorer used here too. I don't remove old drivers very often though. Mine are mostly Intel. When Intel issues a driver update, not all of their packages give the "clean" install option so it leaves the old one. I leave those for a while so that I can use "rollback" to the old driver if a new driver causes problems. I remove the old one once I'm sure the new one works as expected. If I remember right, I think the only time I've ever seen the "clean" option is in Intels graphics drivers. Never in networking drivers.

I haven't used this Driver Store Explorer before.

Can anyone using DriverStore Explorer tell me if this program auto-selects the old and redundant drivers from within Windows so that no manual selection is made ?

I cleaned all my Windows installations, two Windows 11 25H2 on desktop PC and one Windows 25H2 on HP notebook.

I do not advise anything which I haven't tested myself. All Windows installations were cleaned using pnpclean. Therefore, it is too late for me, I think, to try Driver Store explorer. There may be nothing left to clean driver-wise.