Driver Training - cleaning up unused USB drivers

The following tale pertains to my Microsoft Windows 7 PC. I'm sure it's pretty much the same for a Windows 7 laptop. I don't know if any of this applies to Windows 8 or higher.

Out with the old 

As part of my adventure in installing the driver for my new Logitech Marathon Mouse M705 that I posted about in my previous post, I was made aware of a potential issue when installing a new USB device. I am not a real PC hardware guy, as you may surmise...

I'm going to point to and refer to one of the many websites I came across while trying to figure out my mouse problems, this page from "How To Geek" at:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/remove-old-drivers-after-upgrading-to-new-hardware/

Remnants

Every time you install a new USB device that requires a driver (and what doesn't?), that driver is installed on the USB port you plugged the device into. If you later plug that same device into a different USB port on your same PC (or laptop), the driver gets installed again on the new port. The driver also is still associated with the original port so that if you decided to plug the unit in to that port again the driver won't have to be re-installed.

After you have your PC a few years and have plugged USB devices into various ports, you'll end up with a lot of unused drivers on your system.

Windows 7 has functionality for you to see these unused drivers but I didn't know about it until I started down this road.


Windows 7 Device Manager


Device Manager
Device Manager will display unused drivers and drivers for un-attached devices. Those are 2 different settings, by the way.

The page I've linked to above has detailed instructions on how to view the unused and un-attached drivers and I'm not going to repeat their information that they've taken time to provide for free.

The bottom line is that you can view and un-install the unneeded USB drivers. In my case, one of the websites I visited to try to install my new mouse indicated that the drivers may not have installed correctly due to a conflict with another driver already associated with that particular USB port.

I un-installed a lot of drivers. I have used this PC for music recording and have had a lot of different USB devices attached. The PC came with 7 USB 2.0 ports and I've added another card with 4 USB 3.0 ports and I've had them all filled except I always tried to leave one open for temporary use.

I've had mixers, keyboards, fader ports, reverb units, etc., plugged in and after multiple occasions where I've moved the PC or detached it for one reason or another, things were not always plugged in to the same USB ports. I had a lot of old drivers attached to my ports.

Driver Store Explorer


Driver Store Explorer
When my initial attempts at cleaning up old drivers didn't solve my problem, I started looking for more information about installed drivers.

I came across the Driver Store Explorer, a free open source utility that lists drivers by category and also displays multiple versions of the same drivers if they are installed. It will show you which versions are the old version and if desired you can delete the old driver from the interface. I got rid of more duplicated drivers using this functionality.

If you're interested in trying this utility out, on the Driver Store Explorer page, scroll down to the "Releases" section where you'll find a link to "Download the latest version".


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