Windows 7 drivers

[budec]

I have a ton of drivers being loaded on startup: http://i.imgur.com/GJg4e.png

I don't have a lot of this hardware (use a realtek, not creative sound card). Is there any way to see what is being used or has hardware attached?

Would deleting these save any memory or make for a faster startup?

 

[Joe Average]

Not really, no. The primary advice for Windows 7 (and Vista too) is leave it alone. Those drivers are more than likely loading for potential compatibility regardless of you ever actually using them or having that hardware. Some of those are necessary and it's not worth the time and trouble of trying to "trim the fat" just to shave a second or two off the loading/boot times.

Windows 7 (and Vista as well) are not XP, people have to stop thinking in the old manners and develop new habits to replace 'em.

Leave it alone basically means just that: let the OS take care of itself and you'll be fine.

If you want to go in and start disabling stuff, well, you're not gonna get much help around here since nobody really recommends such actions for Vista or Windows 7 - that level of tweaking is absolutely unnecessary anymore.

One place, however, where you can get some speed back in the boot process is the Logon tab which shows what loads from the Run key buried in the Registry - a lot of people have way too much stuff there and it fights with the OS during the boot process to get up and running. It's tough for the OS to boot when in the middle of it the OS is expected to "Run" all your startup apps. Mine is clean:



That's it for mine, seriously. Nothing else gets in there at the startup time - just MSE.

 

[budec]

ok, do you have any info on how it works? I'm looking to understand it more and saying "don't do it" doesn't really clear anything up.

 

[Joe Average]

How what works, Windows 7? Sure, I know a lot about it, but not everything - just what matters.

You're basically looking at the list of drivers that Windows uses to get itself up and running, so... I don't know what else to tell you. When the OS was installed, those drivers were chosen by the hardware detection routines in Windows 7 for a reason - that's why it's not recommended to tinker around with the innards of such things, it could lead to bringing the whole OS down for some reason you can't quite grasp at this point. You may look at that list and say "Oh, I don't have that hardware, let's dump the driver/not load it, etc" and later find something was tied to a component of said driver and now you've got even more problems.

It's your OS, do what you will with it I suppose. I'm not saying I'm holding info back from you, just that I preach (pretty much started) the leave it alone mantra and... well, that's what I preach and I ain't going to veer from it.