Cleaning up Windows NVIDIA Drivers Enhancing Performance and Removing Telemetry

About

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to install the NVIDIA Windows drivers without the telemetry and other bloat that comes with them.

Downloading the Driver

Use the NVIDIA advanced search tool to manually download the driver. If NVIDIA is still maintaining your graphics card, I recommend using the DCH type; if it’s a deprecated card, go for the Standard one, and always choose the Recommended/Certified drivers for both.

Extracting & Setting Things Up

Using 7zip (or any other unzipping tool), extract the drivers to a directory. Once everything has been extracted, you must keep anything on this list, and delete the rest:

• Display.Driver
• Display.Update
• MSVCRT
• NVI2
• NVPCF
• NvVAD
• NvvHCI
• EULA.txt
• ListDevices.txt
• setup.cfg
• setup.exe

Optional

• Display.Optimus (If using an Optimus graphics card, keep this.)
• Display.NView (If using Windows XP or a Quadro card, keep this.)
• PPC (Keep this if using a PowerPC; delete it on x86 64 safely.)
• HDAudio (Keep this if using the HDMI audio, for example, if your monitor has speakers.)
• ShieldWirelessController (Keep this if you use the NVIDIA Shield Controller.)
• PhysX (It’s utilized in a lot of games, so if you play them, keep this.)

Your directory should resemble something like this:

Editing the setup.cfg

Open setup.cfg and delete these three lines at the very end:

<file name="${{EulaHtmlFile}}"/>
<file name="${{FunctionalConsentFile}}"/>
<file name="${{PrivacyPolicyFile}}"/>

Finally, you can run setup.exe with administrative privileges to continue with the standard, now bloat-free installation.

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