Some drivers wear out their welcome yet refuse to leave. You delete them and reboot, and yet there they are, somehow restored, no matter what you do. You can eject those unwanted hangers-on with help from Phyxion's Driver Sweeper, a free tool that can delete or update your system's drivers. It helps you avoid driver conflicts and failure-to-update by deleting obsolete and unwanted drivers, allowing your system and software to install the latest versions. Driver Sweeper lets you create custom filters to update specific drivers, and it can also create backups of the drivers you remove. If you delete a driver and your system coughs up a furball, you can roll back the changes by restoring the driver or drivers you removed (you meant well!). Driver Sweeper also backs up and restores your desktop icons.

Driver Sweeper's plain but clean interface can be re-skinned by clicking Theme on the Navigation sidebar's Options tab and selecting a background color from a dropdown list. We could also change the interface language from a much longer list, set Reboot and General settings under the Miscellaneous tab, and check for Updates. We started by pressing Analyse and Clean. Driver Sweeper analyzed our system's drivers and displayed the results in the main window. Each entry had its own checkbox to select that driver for updating or cleaning, depending on whether we pressed the Analyse or Clean button (and whether updates were available). None of our drivers needed updating, so we selected one to remove, knowing it would cause no harm. First we clicked Backup on the Management tab, selected our driver, and created a backup to roll back the changes, just in case. Driver Sweeper can remove stubborn drivers on reboot, including in Safe Mode, and it removed ours with no trouble; Windows detected and installed an up-to-date driver, too. Driver Sweeper's Help tab doesn't access a Help file, though instructions and screenshots can be had by browsing to the program's Web site.

When your system isn't performing as well as it should, simply updating a driver sometimes makes all the difference. Driver Sweeper can help you with that.