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,
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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.