Removing useless drivers in XP Pro SP3

[morland]

Hi,

Before doing a fresh installation, I want to backup my drivers.

I went into the Device manager and upon selecting 'View Hidden Devices' get a lot of drivers displayed that are otherwise not visible in the normal view of the Device Manager.

Can someone kindly guide what is the best way/tool (free or shareware) to remove the useless drivers.

Thanks

[cluberti]

There is a tool from one of our smods right here on MSFN for doing this sort of thing. Also, there are non-free tools like Driver Magician, and we have a whole section devoted to Device Drivers that you probably want to check out (read the "read-me first" sticky first, of course).

[Guest]

You really don't want to mess with those hidden drivers unless you know exactly what you are doing. Remove some and Windows wont boot. Some like dmboot and dmload, if I'm recalling correctly, can be removed if you don't use dynamic disks. Again, you really don't want to mess with them unless you know what they do and the consequences of removing them. Besides some driver specific cleanup tools, there's no tool that I'm aware of that removes unwanted drivers.

[morland]

Thank you cluberti and -X-

Grateful for your replies.