How to COMPLETELY uninstall ATI drivers from windows 7 Home Premium?

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bender84

78 posts

Master Geek

#91287 10-Oct-2011 20:46

I'm putting on my Dunce hat here. I've Searched for a solution to this to absolutely no avail and all of the suggestions I've read in various forums around the net just simply do not work for me at all.

Dell Studio 1558 Laptop with ATI Radeon 5470

I'm currently using the AMD 8.742 driver, but I am having immense problems with Driver lock ups and freezes. I wish to go back to an earlier driver v8.692 but every time I uninstall the 8.742 driver, windows 7 keeps insisting on re-installing the 8.742 driver back.

I've Disabled the installing of drivers from windows update.

I've tried attacking the problem by using ATI's "uninstall everything" option then going through my folders and registry nuking everything with ATI on it using Windows 7's special administrator account -- Windows still found the 8.742 driver and reinstalled it!!

I tried repeating the above a second time along with using physxion driver sweeper to remove further traces of the ATI drivers. Windows still managed to locate the 8.742 driver and reinstalled it!!

Can someone tell me where the heck windows 7 is storing these old drivers? And can they be removed without *gasp* having to nuke the whole window 7 installation? Surely it can't be that difficult to remove unwanted driver versions??

Many thanks in exasperation

bender84

78 posts

Master Geek

#531723 10-Oct-2011 22:49

Yep, I'm a dunce. (additionally, this has been posted to the wrong forum)

tick "Delete the driver software for this device" under the Confirm device uninstall dialog.

MightyApe

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powerforce

162 posts

Master Geek

#539960 1-Nov-2011 16:21

go download a program called driver sweeper and give that a try.

garvani

1873 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#539968 1-Nov-2011 16:40

Do not use driver sweeper.. It has been discontinued by Guru3D, as it generally causes more problems than it solves.

Edit: there is another driver sweeper made by phyxion that is trying to cash in on the good name Guru3D Driver sweeper once had, i wouldn't touch it, but each to there own.

urban

487 posts

Ultimate Geek

#539987 1-Nov-2011 17:34

Have you tried removing all traces of previously installed ATI drivers from your c: and temp folder?

Normally NVIDIA would pre-install on C:Nvidia before proceeding, I assume ATI would do the same?

Wade

2225 posts

Uber Geek

#539988 1-Nov-2011 17:37

garvani: Do not use driver sweeper.. It has been discontinued by Guru3D, as it generally causes more problems than it solves.

Edit: there is another driver sweeper made by phyxion that is trying to cash in on the good name Guru3D Driver sweeper once had, i wouldn't touch it, but each to there own.

I have a Dell 15R which started giving some random error on boot, was no problem until i needed to scale the display for my new external monitor. It seemed to be a fairly well documented issue, i followed the advice and used that sweep program and f@#ked it up royally, it killed a whole lot more than it should and left me having to do a full format and reload which is no easy task with no decent Dell support discs provided I couldn't get the backup partition to do its thing. In the end I managed to find a downloadable copy of win7 from the web and did a fresh install with my OEM product key.

Me not being an IT god this all turned into a bit of a stressful event!