Driver location please help

[Stealth Dzzl]

Is the C: drive the best place for drivers or would they be okay on another drive. The only reason im asking is because i have had drivers that i cant uninstall unless i formatted the drive and there went my os. I really dont like having anything on my os drive other than my os. I just dont know if performance will take a hit, or any other affects of having drivers on other drives besides os. specifically graphics drivers.

 

[corkyg]

Drivers need to be with the OS in most cases. Why not back up your drivers to a CDR or flash drive?

 

[Stealth Dzzl]

yeah i figured just wasnt sure, whats the best way to remove them when they dont install right and there is no uninstall option?

 

[RebateMonger]

You don't have a choice about where the working Windows device drivers are located. You can see the location of drivers being used for a particular device in the "Driver" tab of the device in Device Manager.

The location of "driver folders" (i.e. c\nvidia\923.222 folder that contains dozens of files) or "downloaded drivers" or driver installation programs (i.e. nvidia923.222.exe that's 30 MB in size) makes no difference. You can put those anywhere you want, or you can erase them after the drivers have been installed into Windows. They are only a source of data files that Windows uses for the actual driver install.

Removal of all references to unwanted drivers that won't uninstall can be tricky. I'm hardly an expert. There's at least one utility that is supposed to help with troublesome drivers. When looking for driver information in Windows, you also need to look for hidden devices and non_present devices which can sometimes cause driver issues and can interfere with driver uninstalls.