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Changing videocard routine.

What do you do when you get a new video card?

  • Fresh install of my OS

    Votes: 4 12.5%

  • Use a driver cleaner program

    Votes: 21 65.6%

  • Just install it and hope it works

    Votes: 7 21.9%
  • Total voters
    32
AltTabbins

AltTabbins

Fully [H]
Joined
Jul 29, 2005
Messages
20,486
Personally, I do a clean wipe and reinstall of Vista. I don't like having to deal with getting rid of drivers and I haven't found a driver cleaner that I have liked yet. I also see a video card as a major change in the system and like swapping a motherboard or cpu, I prefer to start fresh to make sure that I am getting 100% out of my investment.

Even if I don't upgrade, I still do a fresh install at least once a year. To keep it from being a headache I set aside all of my driver cds and programs in a small cd case separate from my other dvds/cds. I also have a laptop 120gb external drive with all of my backed up files on it (music, pictures etc) so its really not a big deal to reinstall.



What do you do when you upgrade your video card?
 
I just use a driver cleaner and slap the new card in and go with it..Have never had any issues.
 
same as Cowboy420. i use Driver Cleaner.NET and have never had any problems. a fresh OS install seems a bit excessive to me...a little on the conservative side.
 
Switched between my 8800GT, 9800GT, Single 4850, and eventually 4850 Crossfire many times in both XP and Vista64 and all I ever did was use the built-in ATi or Nvidia uninstall tool to unload the drivers first (while that particular card was still in the computer). I haven't really had any issues that I can attribute to drivers. 3dmark scores, performance in games is all where it's supposed to be.

The Driver Cleaner program looks cool but at this point the free version is becoming ancient and I'm not going to pay $10 just to remove drivers from my computer :rolleyes:
 
I've not had to reinstall windows to get a card working for yeeeeears.
Maybe its better knowledge of what to do and better tools / un-installation routines but I dont see the need to re-install these days unless windows is already broken badly.
 
Im a hope it works kinda guy. Though I have like 30 different versions of windows xp I made for unattended installs so I probably reinstall once every couple months no big deal.

Can anybody recommend a free driver cleaner?
 
I also just uninstall drivers, shutdown, install new video card and reboot to load the new video card drivers. This has also worked for a new motherboard install w/o issues. Seems like if it works, why go out of my way and waist hours reinstalling when I don't need to? :D
 
I still use XP so I do a fresh install. Remember reading some benchmarks a few years ago (2001?) where they compared fresh install vs uninstalling old drivers and the fresh install performs better (marginal "gains", about 5% I think). I don't know if it is any different now, but I still would format because it makes me feel better.
 
I actually usually use drivercleaner, but this time i formatted as per instructed by visiontek before they'd RMA me.
 
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