Drivers. On Windows and every other operating
system, they're very important. But have you ever wondered what would happen if you just went
in and deleted them all? Well, that's what we're going to find out. Obviously not something you
should try at home, but we're going to have some fun with it. I'm going to do while Windows is
running of course, what other fun would that be? And I'm not going to, of course, use the normal
uninstall method. I'm just going to go and delete the files. And by the end of the video, you'll
definitely know why you shouldn't mess around too much in the system directory where the
drivers are. So it should be pretty fun. Now, before we continue, I want to thank the Sponsor
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stuff. So again, you can go to Privacy.com/ThioJoe or click that same link in the description
and check it out. And with that being said, let's continue. All right. So before I go
and start deleting all the files and stuff, I want to give you a quick crash course so you
know exactly what we will be deleting as we're doing it. So you have a little bit more context
on just how much destruction we're causing. Drivers, you can sort of think of them
like a translator between hardware and the operating system. So you buy a
computer mouse, there's a driver on your system that tells the computer how the mouse is moving
based on the signal that the mouse is sending to it. And there are several different directories
where driver files are stored that we're going to be messing with. So these are all going to be in
the C:\Windows system directory, and namely these are System32\drivers, System32\DriverStore,
SysWow64\Drivers, SysWow64\DriverStore and the INF folder in Windows. And these folders
serve different purposes. So my understanding is that the drivers folders store the actual the
installed drivers, whereas the DriverStore folders have driver packages that are not necessarily
installed but may need to be used if a new device gets plugged in, for example, they're
kind of ready to go. So what Windows does is, if you plug it in a new device first, it's going
to go to the DriverStore folder and check for the nearest matching driver for that device, and
just kind of shoot first, ask questions later. Just put in the nearest matching thing just so
the device gets working right away. And then after that first quick match is installed, Windows will
simultaneously go and try and find a even better driver from Windows Update or something like a
more recent one. And if it does find a better one, actually install that one. And the only difference
between SysWow64 and System32 is the System32 stores 64-bit stuff, while SysWow64 stores 32-bit
stuff. Yes, I know it's backwards. And finally, let me quickly go over some of these file
extensions and file types that we're going to see, but don't worry if you don't really understand
any of this. First of all, there are .sys files and these are the actual drivers themselves.
I believe they're actually technically Dynamic Link Libraries, usually a dll file. But for
some reason these are have a .sys extension, but there are the drivers. There's also the .INF
files. These are mostly found in the driver store, and these basically include some installation
information, such as version number, locations of places to install different files.
Stuff like that. When a driver is installed, the INF file is also copied to the INF folder in the
Windows directory. And in that folder, you'll also see there are PNF files which are pre compiled INF
files, basically just the INF files converted into machine code that the computer can more easily
read. And then finally, there are some language related files, such as the inf_loc files or the
.mui, and these are just going to depend on which language you have installed in the system. Again,
you don't have to remember the details of these. You'll just have a little bit better context
when you see what we're deleting. So anyway, with all that being said, let's actually get
to the fun part. So I'm going to be running on a Windows 11 virtual machine, so I'm not doing
this on my actual computer obviously, because it's going to basically destroy it, you'll see. And
knowing what all these files and folders are for, I'm going to try and start with the folders
that are least likely to cause destruction, so we don't ruin everything right from
the beginning. It'll be a little bit more interesting as it builds up. So what I'll do is
start out with the DriverStore folder and start out with SysWow64, because there's not really
much in here at all, it's kind of empty. And it is going to often require me to have permission to
delete stuff. So I just have a registry tweak that has a right click menu to take ownership of the
file so I can delete it. So deleting that folder was really easy. Probably made no difference,
there wasn't really anything in it. But now let's move on to the System32 DriverStore folder. We
can start off with the language info, directories and this temporary directory. Nothing immediately
obviously seems broken after deleting them. So I'm just going to try and open up some programs like
Microsoft Store, and just kind of click around, open stuff up. Nothing seems broken yet. Now I can
try to delete the File Repository, which has all the driver packages to prepare to install it, and
it says it's in use, so let's go inside it. And I'm just going to try and highlight everything and
delete it, and anything that is in use still, I'm just going to skip. Most folders were deleted, but
there are still 36 remaining. And interestingly, it seems like in these remaining folders that
weren't deleted, the system files are in use, but the INF files aren't. So what I'll do is just
search for the INF files and delete all those, and we can worry about the rest later. Now let's move
on to the Windows\INF folder, and I'll just delete the folders first in here. And here, something
really weird started to happen. Basically, the computer kind of froze and just kept scrolling and
selecting. I couldn't really do anything. There was like a loading circle, so I just kind of let
it go to the bottom and then it unfroze. I have no idea if that was related to me deleting stuff
or if it was just the virtual machine freezing, but it was kind of weird. So after it unfroze, I'm
just going to try again without using the mouse, I'll just do a shift. Click and now it actually
deleted all the folders no problem. And I was also able to just go and delete the rest of
files, even in the entire INF folder there was really no resistance. So I guess none of these
were actively in use. Now again, we can try running stuff to see if there is any issues yet.
So I'll start up this Microsoft Store, you know, click on the Start Menu. Run virtual studio code.
Some stuff that's pre-installed on here. Edge, xbox app, and surprisingly everything still seems
fine so far, apparently. But now let's actually move on to the actual drivers folders. These
are the drivers that have been installed on the computer, so I'm expecting some kind of response
here. Again starting off with SysWow64\drivers. No issues deleting this, it doesn't really
seem to have caused any obvious issues. Again, this was kind of empty pretty much. Now though,
we can move on to the really important one, System32\drivers. The DriverData folder is
already empty. The "etc" folder, I'm just going to delete, I'm not expecting too
much from this. This basically just has some networking configuration files and stuff. And then
I can delete the language files. And all of these got no problem deleted, except there was only one
that I couldn't delete which was the ntfs.sys.mui in the one folder. Again, that's just
the language thing. In the UMDF folder, there was only a couple I couldn't delete because
again they were in use, so we'll come back to that one. And then we come to the WD folder, which
I believe stands for Windows Defender and, this one keeps saying needs permission. And
even though I try to take ownership of this one, it seems like I guess there is some extra
protections built into this one. Again, we can just come back to this. So now let's just try
and go and delete all the individual .sys files in here. These are all the actual driver files again.
And most of them do seem to have been in use, I wasn't able to delete most of them, but I guess
I got a couple of them. But before tackling that again, we can start to just kind of click around
stuff as usual to test things out. And again, nothing really seems to be obviously broken here.
Now, as for these files that are in use, I'm going to try and do a trick to figure out which process
is using them by going to the Resource Monitor. And then I can search for handles for .sys and
the drivers folders, which are the ones that are in use, and I can see that it looks like the
explorer.exe, the File Explorer is using some of these, at least. All right so what I'll try is
just closing the Explorer window, see if that does it. I'm not going to shut down the whole Windows
Explorer yet. That would close off the taskbar and stuff. So what I'll do is use the Terminal instead
of Windows Explorer and I'll run it as admin. So I just go back into the drivers directory and use a
command to delete that from CMD... and all right, it actually worked that time. So, yeah, I guess
Windows Explorer was using those files somehow. So now that we know that works, let's try and go
and delete those other folders that were causing issues. And it seems to work for everything
except for that WD, windows Defender folder again, and also one file in the UMDF folder, which
is apparently in use by the WUDFhost.exe. I looked in the task manager, apparently this is the
Windows Driver Foundation process, but I'm going to hold off on ending that. I have a bad feeling
about closing that down. I think it would cause an issue. Let's try deleting the DriverStore folder
again. So what I'll try is use the "rd" removed directory command instead. And hey,
that did work. So let's try and do stuff again, click around and still not really much change
here. I don't see any kind of problems. And even though there's not any actual physical hardware
attached to the virtual machine, there are still software drivers for the virtual hardware. I even
tried installing some of the bloatware from the Start Menu, that works. There is no problem
with internet. I look in the Control Panel, devices, even no issues in there apparently it's
kind of weird. So let's make sure everything is actually gone here, we can delete what we can.
We did miss some before. So besides that Windows Defender folder, there is only that one language
file in use by that one WUDFhost. And something tells me ending this is not going to be good.
So I wanted to wait to do this last and... yep, it did not like that, crashed the virtual machine.
It just says disconnected, and then when I tried to reconnect, it's just a black, blank screen.
But actually apparently it maybe did not crash, because when I went to hit shut down, actually the
shutting down screen came up . So I don't think the whole machine crashed, it was just some weird
happened. So I guess we're just trying to restart it. However, I'm pretty sure that this is not
going to work. And of course, yes, the automatic repair thing comes up right away, says diagnosing
your PC. I mean, "hmmm I wonder what could have gone wrong possibly?". And here it
obviously is not successful in repairing anything, it keeps saying that it couldn't start correctly.
So I'll try safe mode. No difference. So this installation is probably dead at this point
though, I was surprised it lasted as long as it did, and really didn't have any issues until
I actually closed that process, which kind of caused a reboot. And then when it tried to reload
the operating system, I guess the software wasn't there to do it, and that's what caused the issues
to actually start up. I did want to test one more thing though, so I actually loaded a fresh
checkpoint back to before we deleted all this stuff, and I basically did a speed run to delete
everything again real quick with the command prompt. So at this point again, everything's back
deleted again. I just didn't crash the computer by deleting that process. And what I wanted to do
is actually look in the device manager. I figured drivers, probably in the device manager we're
going to see something right? And really the only thing I noticed is that when looking
at the driver details for different devices, all it says is "no driver files required
or loaded". So I guess it's having trouble finding info about the drivers, which makes sense.
And obviously, if you try to update drivers, it says no drivers found. I also noticed that when
I try to disable a device like a CD drive and then re-enable it, it is not able to re-enable. And it
says could not load driver, may be corrupted or missing. Obviously, it's missing. So basically,
it seems to me like what probably happened is, on boot up all the drivers get loaded by the
operating system and are just kind of held in memory. So deleting the files don't necessarily
cause any immediate effect, unless maybe I did plug in a new device or something, and then it
was just not able to find the drivers for it. Or maybe if for some reason it had to reload a
driver, that would probably be where it would cause an issue during the running Windows, but
otherwise you wouldn't notice anything until you boot it up. Would this have been a different story
if I did this on my main computer where there's plenty more hardware installed? Probably, but I
still think it might have taken a little bit of time before I would have actually seen a crash if
I hadn't rebooted. But still, this should show you that even though things might not immediately go
wrong when you're deleting system files and stuff, if you go to restart the computer, that's
when things are going to really end up bad. So don't think that just because you delete
a file and nothing happens right away, that it's not a problem. Still, I think this
was one of the more interesting experiments. Thanks again to Privacy.com for sponsoring this
video. And be sure to visit Privacy.com/ThioJoe for that $5 credit you can spend on your first
purchase. Limited time only. If you guys want to subscribe, also be sure to click the bell
next to the Subscribe button to enable all notifications. I only upload about twice a week
tops, so you don't want those videos getting lost in the rest of your subscriptions. If you
guys want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is another one of these "What
If" experiments, where I went and deleted all the User folders and AppData folder to see what
would happen there. That one's pretty interesting, too. So definitely check that out. So let me
know what you think down the comments or if you have any other suggestions for weird stuff
that we could try to destroy on the computer, let me know down there. Thanks so much for
watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
