Installing a new video card advice

[joey_rjm5]

I wan to install a video card withought reformatting and starting from scratch. What is the best way for getting rid of the old graphics card drivers?

 

[Jon]

Depends on the type of video card...what do you have?

If it's nVidia then remove it in Device Manager, don't reboot. Go to Start-->Run and type regedit. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation in the registry and delete the entire NVIDIA Corporation folder. Then go to Start-->Search For Files or Folders and type in nv*.* This will bring up all of the files having to do with your nVidia driver (assuming that's what you have). You may want to back all of these files up before deleting them just in case a file begins with "nv" that doesn't belong to your card.

After all of this is done reboot and reinstall your new driver.

Let me know if you have a different manufacturer of video card...all of them basically follow the same principle.

 

[Rav]

Best thing to do would be to switch to the "Standard VGA" drivers that come with windows and reboot a couple times with it before you swap cards. Be sure to uninstall any card specific software as well.

Also, if you are upgrading from a 3dfx card to something else, be sure to delete all the 3dfx???.?? files and glide files. If its an ATI card the files are usually ati???.?? I'm not sure how NVIDIA files are named.

Good luck.

-Rav

 

[joey_rjm5]

Thanks for the help. I got it taken care of now. I just didn't want to run into many problems