I stopped Windows from keeping old drivers and my PC boot time dropped by half

As you use your Windows machine, it's inevitable that it'll experience driver bloat due to outdated drivers that no longer serve any purpose. Not only do these old drivers take up disk space on your PC, but drivers from ghost devices, anti-cheat software from uninstalled games, and TAP adapters from canceled VPNs may still be installed and could be negatively impacting your PC's boot times.

Driver bloat is one of the first things I check when I notice slow boot times on my Windows PC, and clearing it out almost always noticeably reduces boot time.

I stopped leftover drivers from loading up at boot

You have to be careful not to disable useful drivers

Drivers are what let your OS communicate with the hardware on your PC. Most drivers are granted kernel-level access at the time of installation because directly talking to hardware requires privileges that only the kernel has. Since the kernel loads up before you log in, any leftover drivers can negatively impact your PC's boot time. This usually becomes noticeable only after you've been using your PC for a while.

The easiest way to find and remove these leftover drivers is to use Microsoft's very own Autoruns utility, one of the most useful Sysinternals tools.

You can download it from the Microsoft Learn website, or better yet, do what I do and directly run a live version of it using the Run dialog.

1. Press Win +R to open Run
2. Then, input \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\autoruns64.exe and press Enter.
   1. If nothing happens, follow the same process but press CTRL + Shift + Enter to run as an administrator.

Windows may display a security warning. This is completely normal because the app is hosted outside your local network: click the Run option. It's also advisable to create a System Restore Point before removing leftover drivers, just to be safe.

In the Autoruns app, click on the Drivers tab to see all drivers that are loaded during startup. I'd also suggest going to the Options menu at the top and ticking the Hide Microsoft Entries and Hide Windows Entries options to ensure you don't accidentally disable crucial drivers. From the list of drivers, look for ones that belong to devices or software you no longer use: check the Description and Publisher columns to locate them. In my case, I found an orphaned driver that was installed by LatencyMon, a program I'd uninstalled months ago.

It's best to first uncheck drivers, which disables them, and reboot the PC to ensure nothing breaks. You can then delete leftover drivers after you've verified they belong to a device or program you no longer use.

Old drivers are taking up more space than you think

We're talking multiple gigabytes

In addition to leftover drivers loading up during boot, Windows often keeps old driver packages on your drive. This is done so you can roll back to a previous driver version if the current one is buggy. However, these old packages may end up taking unnecessary storage space on your hard drive, especially if you're using a dedicated GPU: NVIDIA and AMD GPU drivers are often more than 1 GB in size.

You can find these old drivers at C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository and delete them manually. However, sifting through them can be cumbersome and risky if you accidentally delete the wrong drivers. What I like to do is use Driver Store Explorer (or RAPR.exe), a tool that automatically scans the aforementioned directory and lists the drivers installed on your Windows PC. You can download Driver Store Explorer from GitHub, or run the following commands in an elevated Command Prompt instance:

1. Installation: winget install lostindark.DriverStoreExplorer
2. Running the program: rapr

Once Driver Store Explorer is up and running, click the Export All Drivers button to create a backup in case things go south. Then, click the Select Old Driver(s) button to automatically select drivers that have a newer version installed on your machine. The selection is usually accurate, but it's best to double-check if any old drivers are left unselected. Click Delete Driver(s) to delete the selected driver packages from your PC. The tool doesn't delete any drivers that are in use: you can delete problematic drivers you don't need by ticking the Force Deletion checkbox before selecting delete.

Once you've done this, it's also worth checking Device Manager for any ghost devices. You can do this by going to View -> Show hidden devices in the Device Manager window. Check if there are any grayed-out devices you no longer use and uninstall them.

Make removing driver bloat a habit

Considering how often Microsoft pushes out Windows Updates, it doesn't take long for old drivers to start eating into your boot times and storage space (especially for PCs using a dedicated GPU). Sadly, there's no easy way to automate this process (I'm open to ideas), so I've simply set up Task Scheduler to launch Driver Store Explorer once each month, so I know it's time to clear out driver bloat from my PC.