removing unwanted drivers

Periodically, one needs to remove a device from the expansion bus of a PC - it's either failed, or the need for it has passed.  But these items have drivers that once loaded are generally hidden from view.  How is an unwanted driver removed from the PC?

**Question :**Were you required or did you install a Driver for this 2 Port USB 3 PCIE add in card from a small Disk that came with it in the packaging box ???

If it did put the Disk back in and see if it has any Install @ Un-install instructions / user manual on a Pdf.

It should have some form of explanatory documentation.

Considering this is a 2 Port USB 3 add in PCIE card i would not be worried about the Driver for this.

Just remove the card if it has failed.

The Driver is just a very small piece of software related to its small chip set which will not affect your computer and is probably only a few Megabytes in size and will not harm your computer if the device is removed as Canadian Tech has mentioned.

From looking at your Device Manager ( what you have posted ) it seems that you have already removed it from your computer otherwise it would be listed there.

For Example the below diagram shows when a 2 Port USB 3 PCIE add in card is installed in a computer.

You could try :

You could try re-installing it and its Driver to see what your Device Manger will show such as the above diagram.

• Also check your Add or Remove Programs just in case it shows up in there in relations to a Driver or new USB Device / software.
• If it does then Un-install it from the Add or Remove Programs.
• You could also try Right Clicking on the individual entries related to the 2 Port USB 3 PCIE and then select Un-install on the individual entries that it has listed.

( NOTE ) : just make a note of the new entries listed in the Device Manager related to the 2 Port USB 3 PCIE so you don`t un-install / remove / delete the wrong items.

Another thing you could try is looking for GHOSTED DEVICES in the Device Manager by running CMD as ADMINISTRATOR.

****To view non-Plug and Play devices, open Device Manager and choose Show Hidden Devices from the View menu. In the default Devices By Type view, the formerly hidden devices will appear under the Non-Plug And Play Drivers branch.

( 1 ) : To view devices that were once installed but are no longer attached to the computer, open a Command Prompt window using the Run As Administrator option and enter the command:

( 2 ) : SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1

          Press enter key.

( 3 ) : Then, from the same command prompt, type

 devmgmt.msc

 Press enter key.

The DEVICE MANAGER should open.

( 4 ) : To see the GHOSTED DEVICES go back to the DEVICE MANAGER which opened and select VIEW and select SHOW HIDDEN DEVICES.

GHOSTED DEVICES will appear GRAYED OUT.

 to open Device Manager. Choose View, Show Hidden Devices. The new instance of Device Manager will show “ghosted” entries for devices that were once present. This technique is especially useful for fixing problems caused by leftover drivers after replacing a network card or video card—you can easily delete the ghosted device.

Below diagram shows some of my Ghosted Devices.

Hope this helps some what.

I noted (prior post) that i had worked  thru the properties of the usb drivers and tried to identify which one was applicable - but failed: nothing even remotely like the device name on the physical item.  Which means that altho it's no longer installed the driver is there, unusable but taking up space.  And I am sure there are similar pieces of driver software that have accumulated over the PC life doing the same thing.

Re driver size; true enough.  But they do accumulate (see below), because there seems to be no 'standard' way to identify the driver(s? - some devices use more than one)  for a particular device and thus be able to remove them without damaging the rest of the system.  Many of them seem to use generic MS windows drivers, and there's no way to identify  which generic driver is being used by specific devices either.

The TreeSize free tool your colleagues pointed me too recently - concerning an upgrade to windows 10 - tells me there are nearly 1Gb of drivers on the system.  In context, that's less than 0.5% of the space on the C drive, but that's a lot of drivers.  Given the well known windows bloat, some way of ensuring that the drivers currently 'resident' are all that are needed seem highly desirable.  Something like:

1. a standard naming convention so in the explorer tree the driver can be easily seen as associated with the hardware it works with; and

2.  a tool to determine and display whether or not the associated hardware for a specific driver is actually present in the system.

The only other way I know of the remove the unwanted driver's is a clean OS install, followed by re-install of all the devices and software a user wants on the PC.  What an absolute pain in ass - days and days of frustration for even a low-level use of the PC for just email and browsing, let alone one that typically does things like document processing, spreadsheets, video editing browsing etc  - I'm sure you know what that's like.

And that's a problem, because my win7 PC control panel/device manager (assumed) does not have a listing for "device drivers".  So, more detail probably needed.

The device concerned is a 2-port usb3 card that plugged into the PCIe bus.  The screen printed part number on it is WLX-USB3.0PCIE V1 2010/01/20.  A google search found install info including image that matches the rear panel appearance of the card. There's also a part number (WLX1202PCIEU300159) on the solder-side label that fails search.  It's been in the desktop thru a motherboard upgrade, and one port is now failed, overall, not now required so I want to clean up the system and get rid of the hardware and any related drivers - thus the question.

If one assumes system manager, usb controllers devices attaching to the bus (screenshot attached), click on properties and not one of them shows details remotely matching the card I have removed.

So, where would I find your "device drivers" item to match the removed hardware??

If your main goal is a clean house, fret not.  Drivers take minuscule space.  They do no harm if the device is removed.

If you really want to try, right click on each of the usb entries until you can find the one(s) related to the hardware you want to remove.  Once you find it, do as I suggested earlier.

When you right click on that driver in Device Drivers, choose uninstall and then choose Delete.