A guy came into Dave’s Computers in New Jersey the other day having problems with his graphics card. He was experiencing artifacts and tearing on a game and the company who designed the game recommended rolling back his graphics driver. He didn’t know how, so came to us for help. That’s why today’s post is a tutorial on how to roll back Windows drivers.
Drivers are specific instruction sets for particular hardware. Without drivers, an operating system may not know how to fully utilize the hardware or may not recognize it at all. As Windows is installed on tens of millions of computers, it is impossible to be able to tell it how to work with every piece of hardware. Instead, manufacturers provide drivers that know what the hardware is and what it can do. Windows communicates with the driver and the driver controls everything from there.
If a new game, application, Windows update or something else is released is incompatible with some aspect of a driver, you are sometimes recommended to roll it back.
Roll back your driver
You have two options when rolling back Windows drivers. You can use the new ‘roll back’ option in Windows 10 or completely uninstall the driver and manually install an older one. I suggest trying the roll back option first and then manually do it if that doesn’t work.
- Right click the Windows Start button and select Device Manager.
- Select the device you’re rolling back.
- Right click on it and select Properties.
- Select the Driver tab and then Roll Back driver.
- Select ‘Previous version of the driver performed better’ and select Yes.
Windows will now uninstall the current driver and automatically install the previous version if it can. This may take a few minutes but should work on most, if not all, devices including graphics card drivers.
If that doesn’t work, let’s do it manually.
- Right click the Windows Start button and select Device Manager.
- Select the device you’re rolling back.
- Right click on it and select Properties.
- Note the driver version in the window.
- Download an earlier driver version to that above.
- Select Uninstall Device and allow the process to complete.
- Reboot if required.
- Install the driver you downloaded in Step 5.
You won’t always have to reboot. Much depends on the hardware in question as Windows can dynamically restart some hardware but not others.
That’s how to roll back a Windows driver to a previous version. It is now a simple matter of letting Windows do the work for you and if that doesn’t work, doing it yourself. It’s a straightforward process that anyone can do.
If you’re having issues with drivers or anything to do with computers, the guys at Dave’s Computers in New Jersey can help!
