How To Roll Back A Driver In Windows 10
Windows, regardless which version you have, automatically installs generic drivers for your system. The drivers sometimes update when you install Windows Updates. Other times, you might manually update a driver, or a utility on your PC might do it for you. Driver updates are generally a good thing; they mean your hardware manufacturer is still actively adding support for the latest OS updates. Hardware that continues to get updates will be compatible longer. Unfortunately, driver updates don’t always play nice with the latest OS version, or with other hardware components. You might find a driver update has broken something instead of improving it. In such a case, you should roll back a driver to the previous version that worked. Here’s how to roll back a driver in Windows 10.
Driver updates are pretty easy to roll back however, you need administrative rights to do so. If you have several accounts configured on your Windows PC, it’s best to sign in with the admin account to roll back a driver instead of using a normal account and entering the admin password.
Roll Back A Driver
Open Device Manager. You can use Windows Search to look for it, or open the run box via the Win + R keyboard shortcut and enter the following;
devmgmt.msc
In Device manager, look for the hardware component you want to roll back a driver for. There will be several different scenarios here so we’re going to go through each one. The first is when you have a roll back option available. Double-click the hardware component to open its Properties. Go to the Driver tab, and click the Roll back driver button, assuming it isn’t greyed out.
If the option is greyed out though, it means there is no driver version that Windows can roll back to. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to roll back a driver, just that you won’t be able to do it from the built-in option.
If you know which version of the driver you want to use, download it separately. You can find drivers, old and new versions, from your PC manufacturer’s website. Some drivers download as EXE files such as Dell driver. If that’s the case, you can run the EXE file and install a driver. Before you do that though, go to Device Manger and uninstall the Device.
Now, run the EXE file that your driver came as. It will automatically detect your hardware and everything should be good to go. If your driver didn’t come as an EXE file, you will need to go through Device Manager to install it.
Open Device Manager, and open the properties of the device you want to roll back a driver for. Go to the Driver tab and select Update Driver. Select Browse my computer for driver software>Browse. Select the folder you saved the driver file to, and Device Manager will be able to find it. It will handle everything else. You might need to restart your system for some changes to take affect.
This will work on Windows 7, 8/8.1, and Windows 10.
