How do I completely remove a driver?

[w00kiec00kie]

I wanted to uninstall a sound driver on dell 8500 laptop to install the Realtek provided driver (found from this forum) only to find out that windows was kind enough to restore my old drivers (SigmaTel) for me to uhh get messed up with. Now I am getting random beeping noises from my bass, and it gets quite annoying as I cannot tell when it's coming and things like that... I'm guessing its a driver conflict and was wondering if anyone knew how to remove a driver COMPLETELY from a system.


oh and by "completely," I mean like when I click "update driver" in the devices panel, it will not show up there... (I noticed that many drivers still show up, and think I read something about windows saving the old drivers... )

help the noob!!

 

[dreamliner77]

First, go into bios and deactivate the onboard sound.

Then in windows, uninstall the driver from device manager. This probably won't delete all associated files, so you will have to look on the net for just which files you need to manually delete for your chip/driver.

Reboot.

Install the new driver.

Reboot to bios, activate onboard sound.

you *should* be good to go.

 

[Bytes Back]

Right click on the device in device manager, choose properties and then the driver tab.

click the driver files button and this will list all the files the device uses.

Note these names and then uninstall the device from device manager

Before rebooting do a search for the files you listed and delete them, When you reboot windows should now consider this as new hardware.

 

[w00kiec00kie]

The instructions were very helpful! (disable in bios -> uninstall the files manually = windows cant install )
The drivers seemingly work fine as I get no noise now... but when I go to the device manager, and choose the "update driver", I still see the old driver. (even though when I choose to "upgrade" to it, it will tell me that it is not able to locate the files...)

Any way to remove the drivers out of the "update driver" list?