DriverCleaner – the best $10 you can spend
So I decided to update my drivers for a Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS, and got the latest that were available from Creative Lab’s website…what a mistake…After a shoddy install, all my audio stopped working. During installation of the latest drivers I started getting all kinds of error messages while it was writing stuff to the registry from what I could gather. I was not a happy camper when those started popping up. After the installation was done, everything audio related stopped working.
I tried to uninstall the whole mess and reinstall from the CDs but nothing worked. I tried uninstalling everything Creative related multiple times. Started disabling all the other sound devices windows had listed, thinking perhaps windows was trying to use them and ignore the Creative stuff after reinstalling from CD, but none of it worked. I ended up with a bunch of error messages about bad commands to the mixer etc when trying to play audio and none of the Creative apps worked either. None of the sound control panel stuff was recognizing the card and drivers correctly. It was showing the device as D400, which is one of their dealies, but it wasn’t listing it as it normally would. I probably spent a good 3 or 4 hours trying to clean up the mess Creative Labs made of my computer.
After a few hours of trying to straighten it out, I ended up just giving up and started to back up my system and migrate all the files I needed from my OS drive elsewhere. Not looking forward to a week-long reinstall process to get my system back to the way I had it, I decided to give one last go at fixing it. I popped into Guru3D’s forums and someone mentioned using DriverCleaner PE. I followed the link, read a little on the website and decided I’d just drop the $10 to buy the program. It was probably the best $10 I’d spent in a while. After looking through the help file briefly on how to uninstall and clean, I ran through the process, ran the advanced clean (I wanted to make sure EVERYTHING got removed). After I rebooted, I made sure things were uninstalled, ran the scan again and had it get rid of some stuff that got replaced by the system restore in XP. I shut off system restore, had it remove the last remaining things then reinstalled the drivers from the CD and everything worked perfectly.
If you are having a hard time with new drivers or can’t get rid of old ones, I highly recommend using DriverCleaner. Hell, I might even start using it every time I have to update drivers for something. It found pretty much everything that Creative had put on my system. It seems they keep their software up to date with all the possible files and registry entries various hardware manufacturers use for their drivers. It’s an absolutely awesome product and well worth the $10.
