Originally posted by Sundiver
Now, I got the drivers what's the proper proceedure to totally clean the prior drivers from your system before installing new ones?
Might this not be a good sticky thread/faq for Radeon/Nvidia drivers?
Go to the control panel, Add Remove Software. Find your drivers (Nvidia or ATI) and remove them. After the uninstall, reboot. Your computer will start up, and there wont be a driver for your video card. It will automatically search and find a generic VGA Compatible. Let that install. This is the tricky part.
If you had Nvidia before, and are staying Nvidia, all I would do is run a cleaner utility to mop up anything the uninstaller missed. I recommend this one
http://driverheaven.net/cleaner/Some recommend going as far as searching your Windows folders for remaining files and cleaning the registry too. I think thats excessive, although registry cleaning isnt a bad idea to keep stuff from cropping up. Its most important to clean up the old files if you are going BACKWARDS in drivers, or if you are getting away from a driver that caused serious issues. If you DO want to clean your registry up, this is a good free tool
http://www.macecraft.com/downloads/I use both this one and Registry Mechanic from PCTools. But that one aint free.
After making sure all traces of the old drivers are gone, reboot again just to be safe. Now install your new drivers.
If you had ATI before, and are staying ATI, use the same procedure.
If you are SWITCHING from ATI to Nvidia, or vise versa, there are more considerations.
Nvidia is becoming well known for their motherboard chipsets these days. The nForce boards have a well deserved reputation for quality, but it makes the driver issues more confusing when you also have an Nvidia video card. If you have one of these boards, and use an Nvidia video card, you will have nForce drivers, and Forceware drivers. Its easy to get things confused. The uninstall utility will generally give you the choice of what to uninstall, but you cant be sure. In this case, I make sure I have the newest nForce drivers downloaded from Nvidia and then I uninstall EVERYTHING that has to do with Nvidia. Then go through the procedures outlined above. Then in addition to the new video drivers, you install the new nForce drivers for your motherboard at the same time.
After all this is done, I generally do a reinstall of Direct X as well, as it can get corrupted during repeated installs and uninstalls of drivers. This makes sure your Direct X install is pointing to the right drivers in the right places. Run the tests and save a copy of the Diagnostic report, just in case. Assuming all tests pass, I go through and set my video settings, then I find the video settings folder in the AH folder and delete it. Start up AH, let the video card be detected, and set my video settings up ingame. Log in and try it out, tweak from there.
