As you will know from recent posts, I changed out almost my entire system. Out went the AMD/nVidia based system to make way for an AMD/ATI system.

Except that not everything went out. I discovered by running SIW that there was a mass of nVidia driver code still kicking around, and I couldn’t upgrade the mouse and keyboard drivers at all.

The solution - Find the hidden devices and uninstall them. 

This is how you get them to show..

1. Right-click on My Computer
2. Select Properties from the context menu
3. Click Advanced tab
4. Click Environment Variables
5. Click New
6. In the variable name put devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices
7. In the variable value put 1
8. Click OK to exit

This is where the really tedious part starts.

Open up Device Manager, click on VIEW and select show hidden devices.

Open up each section, and uninstall anything that is greyed. You will need to occasionally check the box to completely uninstall the drivers.

Greyed items which may not need to be uninstalled might be a scanner that is only used occasionally, or a flash drive maybe. All of the rest can go. You will be amazed as what is there.

Anyway, after five minutes or so, you will be adept at deleting old drivers, and the benefit is that you should once again be able to update drivers without incurring problems, and your system will be that much cleaner too.

Run SIW again, click on PCI in the hardware section and you will see that there are no more driver carry-overs, and one less issue that can be blamed for problems in the future.