Nvidia driver installation question

I've just installed the latest Nvidia driver and even though I had the "clean installation" box unchecked, I had to redo a lot of tweaking under the "manage 3d settings" tab in nvidia control panel. It's been a very long time since last updated drivers, so I must have skipped an important step or something, what would it be?

I only update drivers when nvidia clearly states that it offers better performance for a game I'm playing, and since I've been playing the same game since last year's September, I was using the 301.something version.

PS: I always manually uninstall the current driver before updating it, instead of just overwriting installations. Even though, this the 1st time I have this issue

So what's your question? The installers aren't 100%, they can sometimes mess up settings if new ones are introduced etc.

I just wanted to know how to proceed so that it won't happen again.

I just realised, you said you manually uninstalled the driver first. This is probably why you lost the settings.

Next time, leave it there, leave the box unchecked and see what happens. It should be OK. Afterwards, delete the old driver files.

Where?

The default location is C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver

I see, but I'm quite sure this folder you pointed is just for the extraction and the files in it have nothing to do with the actual driver installation, right? The driver itself is installed somewhere else, isn't it?
I'm saying this because:
1 - I've once or twice deleted this folder just to see what would happen and nothing happened
2 - I didn't understand the reason for deleting them, specially considering they would be the old files, and not the new ones I would've just installed. In which case, wouldn't they just overwrite each other, causing a huge mess during installation?

But worry not my friend, whatever problem/doubt I had is already solved. Thanks for the attention. I was more on to understanding what was going on than solving an actual issue.