Old Nvidia Driver Removal
Now we move on to the simplest, and yet most commonly mishandled part of using graphics drivers - the removal of previous Nvidia graphics drivers. To do this successfully, you need to follow some simple steps which will help guarantee that your installation of the drivers is "clean", and leads to trouble-free performance. I particularly recommend this procedure if you are experiencing graphical corruption or strange behavior. To completely remove your existing Nvidia graphics drivers, and all traces of them from your system do the following:
1. Uninstall any existing graphics drivers. To do this, go to Control Panel>Add or Remove Programs. Select the 'Nvidia Drivers' (or similar) item if available and click the Change/Remove button. Follow the prompts from there to uninstall your existing Nvidia drivers, and reboot as prompted. If you happen to have any other graphics drivers left over from previous hardware, such as ATI graphics drivers, uninstall them from here as well. If you cannot find any Nvidia entries, you are probably using the default Windows XP graphics drivers, which means you can skip to the Forceware Installation section of the guide further below.
2. When you reboot, you will find Windows XP will detect your graphics card as one (or more) new devices. It will then attempt to find appropriate drivers for your card. Cancel out of all such attempts.
3. This step is optional, however it is strongly recommended if you are either (a) downgrading your Forceware drivers to a previous version, or (b) experiencing problems and want to ensure you have a "clean install" of the Forceware drivers. Basically the aim is to find all the individual Nvidia graphics driver files and remove them manually. Note that if you have an NForce motherboard, you should not undertake this step, as you may delete Nvidia driver files which relate to your motherboard and not the graphics card. To manually delete the Forceware drivers go to your C:\Windows\System32 and C:\Windows\System32\Drivers directories, and find and delete all files beginning with 'NV...'. You may notice that some of these files keep recreating themselves - don't worry, these are just the default XP Nvidia drivers which are protected and can't be permanently deleted. Just delete all the Nvidia driver files and let XP decide which default files the system should keep. Alternatively you can use the Windows Search function (Start>Search), with the search string NV*.* to make searching and deletion faster. Importantly however, do not delete the files under the \ServicePackFiles or \Lastgood directories, or under any game or application-specific directories. Just stick to files found under the two directories mentioned earlier. Finally, make sure you delete the entire program folder(s) where you installed the Forceware drivers. The default install location is C:\NVIDIA but if you chose another location when installing, go there and delete the folder and all its contents.
4. This step is optional, but again it is recommended if you want to ensure a "clean install", especially if you are experiencing graphics-related problems. It involves removing any graphics-related Nvidia registry entries left over. To do this, I recommend using either RegSupreme, or its earlier (and completely free) cousin, RegCleaner 4.3. To use RegSupreme, start the program and once it has cached your files, start a 'Deep' scan, then wait and choose the 'All' item under the Select menu to highlight all the 'invalid entries' found, and click the Fix button to remove them all, making sure to save a backup under a descriptive name. To use RegCleaner, open the program and on the front page put a tick next to the 'Nvidia'-related entries which don't refer to nForce as well, and then click the 'Remove Selected' button. If you want to use the Windows XP Registry Editor instead, go to Start>Run and type "RegEdit" (without quotes). Then go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key, select the 'Software' subkey, and scroll down to the 'Nvidia Corporation' entry, and underneath you should find a 'Global' entry. Right-Click on this 'Global' key and select Delete to remove it. Note that this method is not as thorough as using RegSupreme or RegCleaner, which find other hidden Nvidia entries.
That should remove all the bits and pieces of old Nvidia graphics drivers and Control Panels which have been installed on your system previously. Of course the quickest method is to just uninstall the Nvidia Driver item in Add/Remove Programs under the Control Panel, but as I said, if you have a history of graphical problems, if you've installed multiple versions of the Forceware drivers without a clean out, or if you are reverting to an older version of the Forceware drivers from a newer one, I strongly suggest you follow all four steps above at least once.
