Install video card and sound drivers only without control panel/control center.

[Wolverine607]

I am looking for a way to customize driver installations so that only the dirvers are installed and not the customized application that comes with many of them.

Like I would like to install NVIDIA video card driver only without the NVIDIA service and control panel. I also want to do so for ATI video cards where only the driver is installed and not the Catalyst Control Center. I do not even want the ATI service installed which still installs anyway even if you select to not install the CCC during installation. Also I want to be able to install Realtek AC97 and HD audio drivers without the Realtek sound.aduio manager software installing with it.

Basically, I want to install the sound and video card drivers just so the drivers only are installed and Windows Device Manager recognizes the device for what it is and nothing else at all is installed kind of like when Windows has its own driver built in for video card and sound cards that are older then the current version of Windows.

I am looking to do this for both Windows XP/2003 64-bit and Windows Vista/7 64-bit.

I have looked everywhere online for information about how to modify the inf files to do it, but have not found anything able to help me.

Does anyone have any suggestions or links to download drivers only that won;t install the associated application/services with it for ATI/NVIDIA video cards and Realtek sound controllers?

 

[RebateMonger]

I just installed a new ATI card two days ago, installing only the driver program and not the Control Center. ATI offers the downloads both separate and as a combined package.

Here's an ATI page that offers both combined and separate downloads for my card:
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=win7/windows-7-64bit

I don't know if you can get the NVidia software separate from NVidia. I haven't looked. I believe that the NVidia drivers offered by Microsoft Updates don't include the NVidia Control Panel.

I see in my win7 "Uninstall or change a program" control panel that the NVidia Display Control Panel is listed as a separate program, along with the NVidia Drivers and NVidia PhysX. Can't you just unintall the NVidia Control Panel?

The Realtek downloads page offers both XP and Win7 64-bit "Driver only" downloads:
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads...=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

 

[Binky]

As mentioned above, ATI does offer a driver-only download. If you need more configurability, you can use something like ATI Tray Tools or RivaTuner.

For the sound drivers, you can probably just avoid the driver installation packages and use the Windows hardware manager to manually find and install the drivers for the device. Even if you downloaded the full setup package, you can probably find the driver folder in there and have windows use those drivers w/o the (possibly) bloated manager package.