Windows 10 and cleanly updating Nvidia display drivers

supastar1568

Senior member
Apr 6, 2005
910
0
76
Hey All,

Quick question, and forgive me if this has been answered elsewhere. I installed Windows 10 last night and of course up first boot it spends about 10 minutes installing the Nvidia driver that is packaged with Windows (353.62 I think).

However, I want to upgrade to the latest and greatest Nvidia display driver. Typically, in the past, I would go to Add/Remove programs and uninstall the existing drivers, and install the new one. Easy as pie.

In Windows 10, once I uninstall the existing driver it immediately starts downloading it and installing it in the background...which gives me an error message when I'm trying to install the newer driver. Even with automatic updates in the system settings disabled beforehand, it still wants to get 353.62 probably cause it is packaged with windows.

From what I've read from the Nvidia site, the best way to do it for Windows 10 is to let 353.62 install, then right click on the Nvidia control panel and install the new driver from there. Selecting "custom" and "clean install" of course.

Is that my best bet? Anything else?

Thanks.
 

n0x1ous

Platinum Member
Sep 9, 2010
2,574
252
126
yep just grab the latest driver from nvidia's website and click custom install then check the box for a clean install.
 

Techhog

Platinum Member
Sep 11, 2013
2,834
2
26
What Nvidia is telling you was always the best way to do it, really. So yeah, just do that.
 

Teizo

Golden Member
Oct 28, 2010
1,271
31
91
If you want, you can download DDU from Guru3D which will completely uninstall the driver and enable a setting in the registry that will stop W10 from auto installing.

http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

After extracting, click on the application....hit 'yes' to reboot into safe mode (the program will do this for you). Once in safe mode the program will load and then just hit the 'clean and restart' tab. A message about setting the auto gpu driver download will prompt...hit 'ok'....let the program do it's thing and reboot into windows. Then install the new driver.
 

TheRyuu

Diamond Member
Dec 3, 2005
5,479
14
81
yep just grab the latest driver from nvidia's website and click custom install then check the box for a clean install.

This.

Longer answer: This will reset all the registry entries and anything of importance and clear out the shader cache. Apparently the only thing that can remain from previous installs are custom profiles (non-nvidia ones) which have applications added to them[1].

[1] According to a guru3d forum post.
 

bononos

Diamond Member
Aug 21, 2011
3,921
177
106
Unplugging the network cable before uninstalling/installing would probably get around windows automatically installing drivers or changing that auto driver installation setting in Win10