So what about the driver store?

I was asked this recently and I thought it was an interesting question:

I know I cant delete things out of the component store, but what about the driver store?  Can I remove files from there without hurting anything?

The answer to this is: YES.

The driver store is a serviceable entity.  Drivers that Microsoft authors, like NTFS.SYS for example, obviously live here and are updated.  Does that mean that you need to keep every version of NTFS, or your old Nvidia or ATI drivers for that matter?  Of course not.  And for systems that are space sensitive, this would be one place to potentially see some impact on the bottom line when it comes to disk usage, especially if the machine were an upgrade or was in service for a while.  So, how do you get rid of the old drivers?  Personally, I always use pnputil.exe, it’s inbox and is fairly easy to use.  Here’s an example:

First, I would list out all of the drivers that are OEM.  The reason being that this has the highest likelihood of producing duplicates over time as the drivers are updated.  Here’s an example of my machine:

pnpuitl -e

Microsoft PnP Utility

Published name : oem0.inf
Driver package provider : Microsoft
Class : Printers
Driver date and version : 06/21/2006 6.1.7600.16385
Signer name : Microsoft Windows

Published name : oem1.inf
Driver package provider : NVIDIA
Class : Display adapters
Driver date and version : 06/09/2010 8.17.12.5849
Signer name : Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher

From here, you can remove any oem.inf’s you find that might be extra, my machine is pretty clean, as you can see from the example, but if I had updated my Nvidia driver several times, I might have 3-4 of those sitting around.  Once I have identified the driver I want to get rid of (let’s say the printer driver I have installed), I use the following command:

pnputil –d oem0.inf

It will remove the INF and the associated driver package in the store from the machine.

For more on command syntax and usage, see the MSDN page here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff550423(v=VS.85).aspx

Hope that helps,

--Joseph

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Thanks for that, it's the main reason I started this blog (to get your feedback and help make our products better for you).  Keep the feedback coming!

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Point taken.  However, if you have 120GB of space and are struggling with free space, my assertation would be that its not Windows that the problem unless you have a serious bug of some sort, which we would have probably seen already.  I'll see what the product group thinks of the suggestion though.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I like this idea Drew, I'll suggest something like that.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2010
  This is another area besides WinSxS where as a user I feel the design is fundamentally flawed. Drivers should not be staged, all the drivers should not be stored in the DriverStore. The user should be asked to insert the disc. At least this should be optional during Setup (Copy all driver files to disk or not?). This is another example of the OS not showing consideration for the user's disk space. Another example why Vista was received as bloated. Why people refused to accept Vista's disk footprint from XP. The XP way was better: storing essential drivers compressed in the CAB file and other drivers on disc. Give users the option of whether they want to have all drivers staged or only on the Windows DVD and they will be very happy.

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 23, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 25, 2010
  Thanks. The best thing about this blog is your open attitude to accepting suggestions and forwarding it to the relevant product group.

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2011
  Cool. Thanks Joseph.