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Question: If you use Disk Cleanup tool and click to also include system components, doesn't that remove outdated drivers?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 If less technical users were constantly purging outdated drivers, then they would be forced to search online for a copy of the good driver they removed.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.