This is one very poorly documented fact about hardware maintenance: newer driver installation programs almost never take care of properly deleting their previous versions. And these driver leftovers (programs, libraries, or registry records) can cause you performance issues, startup problems and sometimes will not allow you to effectively install the newer versions.
I personally experienced this, when I bought the ASUS GTX285 video card I was running the nvidia v185 drivers. Those drivers are supposed to work fine with the card but when I tried some games I noticed that I was getting very low framerates on GTAIV and Empire: Total War, so I upgraded to the latest v186 drivers but the issues got even worse, giving me crashes and even lower FPS.
Troubleshooting my issue and with a little help from Google I stumbled upon this little program: DriverSweeper, whose purpose is to completely remove any specific driver that you indicate. So I fired up the utility, marked everything related to nVidia, and hit the "Clean" button.
Later reinstalled the 186 drivers and my games were working flawlessly again with the highest settings and I was always getting above 40fps.
So here is my tip: Always remove old drivers before upgrading!
DriverSweeper is free, there are paid counterparts that have additional features such as driver backup, safe recovery, online driver compatibility lookup, etc. So which one you use is up to you.
I am a senior programmer born in Argentina. I work full time as a programmer and part time as a freelance web developer.
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