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

spapakons said:

Question: If you use Disk Cleanup tool and click to also include system components, doesn't that remove outdated drivers?

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No. Because MS always wants to give users the option from Device Manager to roll back to a good driver. If less technical users were constantly purging outdated drivers, then they would be forced to search online for a copy of the good driver they removed.

This might be more difficult for legacy devices.

suatcini54 said:

Anyone can wonder about the reason for anything, not only the reason for this thread. This thread is intended for those who wish to clean old, duplicate, and redundant drivers from their systems.

There is also a logic in my opinion to this thread. In the past I myself faced problems while upgrading my PC to a newer build because a driver was causing conflict with the new build. By cleaning the old drivers, one cannot totally eliminate this conflict problem with newer builds but there is a chance of reducing the possibility of facing conflicts. Cleanliness is of top priority.

Also, if some forum members and/or visitors are in the habit of integrating drivers before clean installation, this thread may be helpful to them. I back up the drivers and always integrate them into the image before installing.

Hope my answer fulfills your wonder.

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While 26H2 can be installed as an Enablement Package, so a driver update is not necessary, it's not a bad idea to make sure you have the latest drivers first. My approach before any upgrade, especially if there is a large gap, such as Windows 10 or old Windows 11 version, is to make sure I have upgraded all my drivers first and have installed all available Windows Updates to maximize compatibility between the two versions. While I will disconnect from the internet and use the ISO to upgrade my unsupported computer, it's safer to have the latest drivers so Setup won't try to replace them with some built-in or already downloaded driver update. Like I said installing all drivers and updates beforehand minimizes the risk of anything going wrong. Even when installing an Enablement Package, it's better to install it on a higher build than the minimum requirement. Better safe than sorry.

suatcini54 said:

if some forum members and/or visitors are in the habit of integrating drivers before clean installation, this thread may be helpful to them.

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That is precisely why I like to keep my driver store tidy. I've noted here in the forums that I do a lot of testing, causing me to do clean installs of Windows multiple times every single day. While this sounds like a major undertaking, keeping a fresh set of exported drivers makes it easy. I can from bare metal to a fully installed copy of Windows including all drivers in somewhere around 10 minutes (rough estimate). Deleting old drivers can literally save several minutes per install.

Why you do your experiments on the real computer and not use a virtual machine? I guess you want to test performance on real hardware. You can also enable System Restore and create a restore point before each experiments. If anything goes wrong, you can simply undo your changes by restoring back to that or the previous restore point.

spapakons said:

Why you do your experiments on the real computer and not use a virtual machine? I guess you want to test performance on real hardware. You can also enable System Restore and create a restore point before each experiments. If anything goes wrong, you can simply undo your changes by restoring back to that or the previous restore point.

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I do use virtual machines quite a bit for my initial testing. However, most of my testing involves unattended installati0n and anytime I make major changes I want to try it on real physical hardware to make sure I didn't break any of my other processes such as the installation of all the drivers during installation. For that step, I use multiple real physical machines.

In addition to that, I'm always tweaking my program that manipulates Windows installation media, so I have to again test on real hardware to be sure that all those processes are still working. I do all my initial testing on VMs, but there are some things that I just need physical machines for.

As for doing things like a system restore, yes, I use those tools where appropriate, however, since my "thing" is unattended installation, this doesn't help me with that.

hsehestedt said:

I do use virtual machines quite a bit for my initial testing. However, most of my testing involves unattended installati0n and anytime I make major changes I want to try it on real physical hardware to make sure I didn't break any of my other processes such as the installation of all the drivers during installation. For that step, I use multiple real physical machines.

In addition to that, I'm always tweaking my program that manipulates Windows installation media, so I have to again test on real hardware to be sure that all those processes are still working. I do all my initial testing on VMs, but there are some things that I just need physical machines for.

As for doing things like a system restore, yes, I use those tools where appropriate, however, since my "thing" is unattended installation, this doesn't help me with that.

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I'm curious; why do you do multiple installs a day? Is this for your work, or just a hobby like my own 'tinkering'?

kelper said:

I'm curious; why do you do multiple installs a day? Is this for your work, or just a hobby like my own 'tinkering'?

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I'll give you the slightly long overly detailed version of my answer to that.

I started playing with PC's in the 1980s and back then there was no one around to teach me. I had to research and test and tinker and learn everything on my own. Eventually I ended up at Microsoft as an Enterprise Technical Support Engineer and that meant a lot more research and a lot more testing for my customers.

Today that is simply what I am used to. I like to keep learning and teaching myself new things mainly focused on Windows setup and unattended installation, so I keep tinkering and testing. That in turn led to me writing my own program that I link to down in my signature. That program is intended to allow me to do just about everything I might ever want to do with a Windows image file including injecting all the latest updates, creating unattended answer files and much, much more. But to be able to write all that code, I have to do an awfully lot of testing and I have to try all kinds of different scenarios. Any time I make any major modifications to my program I need to make sure I'm not breaking other things, so I always do a full battery of tests against the ISO images that are created by my program.

Then there are people like @garlin who make posts that sound so matter of fact but that make a light bulb go off in my head and gives me new ideas. So, I have no choice but to go and test the things that he's posting because there's a really good chance that doing so might teach me something new. Garlin is by no means the only person who I get all kinds of ideas from, but I just like to single him out because he has a habit of doing that very frequently .

Then there is the fact that I am retired giving me lots of time on my hands which is great for all this testing and learning that I like so much to do.

Another problem for me is that invariably when I'm researching one topic I come upon other things and I have to take notes to remind me to look at those things later, so I don't end up getting torn in 20 different directions at once. That means that I always have a queue full of things to research and tinker with when I'm done with whatever I am currently doing. In other words, it is never ending.

Now the short answer which is probably what I should have posted here in the first place: It is simply what I enjoy doing because I've been into PCs since the 1980s and PCs are continuously evolving so there is never an end to what can be learned.

I started using MS-DOS 3.3 in my first PC and then gradually moved to MS-DOS 5.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and all the versions up to Windows 11. Until Windows 10 (2015) I hadn't discovered these useful forums. I did my own test and learn. I remember returning home for vacations when at University and within the first week our PC was damaged because of my experiments. Then I fixed that so I learned something new. Most of my experience until 2015 was from my own trials and errors. Now I share this experience with this forums and gain new experience from other posters.

I am was surprised how clean my system was 2 very small drivers.
A nice little utility.

spapakons said:

I started using MS-DOS 3.3 in my first PC and then gradually moved to MS-DOS 5.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and all the versions up to Windows 11. Until Windows 10 (2015) I hadn't discovered these useful forums. I did my own test and learn. I remember returning home for vacations when at University and within the first week our PC was damaged because of my experiments. Then I fixed that so I learned something new. Most of my experience until 2015 was from my own trials and errors. Now I share this experience with this forums and gain new experience from other posters.

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I bet you've seen a few 'HAL missing' warnings in the early days! It always seemed to require a reinstall with lots of floppy disks!

@hsehestedt I don't see any signature? I see Glasskutters.

kelper said:

@hsehestedt I don't see any signature? I see Glasskutters.

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One good feature of Windows 95/98 was that you could repair the Registry even if Windows could not load (scanreg command line tool). Also if Windows could not load, you could reinstall it, but unlike modern Windows versions if you didn't format the drive you did an in-place upgrade/repair instead keeping all your applications and files! With modern Windows versions if they don't load, you cannot repair them like that, your only option is to reinstall them from scratch.

PS: Everyone might remember the importance of choosing the correct regional settings during installation. If you selected the wrong code pages, then it was extremely difficult to fix it as it involved manually exporting certain system files from the cab files in the CD-ROM. It was much easier to just format the disk and reinstall Windows. I had done this mistake a couple of times, reinstalled Windows 95/98 but learned to pay attention next time. Fortunately, in newer Windows versions you can correct the regional settings after installation without affecting the rest of the system. A common mistake I have seen since Windows XP is that here in Greece the users chooses to install the US English version of Windows but doesn't change any regional settings. This as a result makes Windows use the US date format (mm/dd/yyyy) instead of the Greek dd/mm/yyyy and they might not be able to type in Greek. In Windows 95/98 the only solution was to just format the disk and reinstall Windows making sure you choose code pages 437-737. Fortunately, in Windows XP and higher I can just add the Greek keyboard layout and make the relevant corrections in Regional Settings.

kelper said:

@hsehestedt I don't see any signature? I see Glasskutters.

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Doh! I forgot that I removed it. It will remain removed.

Recently I installed build 8894 on my unsupported hybrid tablet/laptop Fujitsu Stylistic Q702 (4th generation Intel Core-i5, 4GB RAM). I run the winver command to confirm the update was successful and I was surprised to see it was Windows 11 24H2 build 26100.8894. It seems I had forgot to switch it to 25H2. I just run the 25H2 Enablement Package and a few seconds and one restart later I was in version 25H2 build 26200.8894. Nothing else changed at my system, no settings or customizations or any apps where affected. Similarly I expect the switch to 26H2 this October will be easy without issues. So if you already run 25H2, just install the 26H2 Enablement Package when it is released and one restart later you will be running 26H2. No special preparation is necessary.