Author: Chris Hoffman / Source: howtogeek.com
If you’re a gamer (or just a PC user) with NVIDIA graphics, NVIDIA’s drivers are probably wasting gigabytes of storage on your hard drive. NVIDIA leaves old installer files buried on your hard drive until you get annoyed and manually delete them…if you even realize you need to.
As someone who’s used NVIDIA graphics hardware for years, this has been annoying me for a very long time. I’ve seen these files use over 4 GB of space, and, while that may sound like a small amount of space to some, it’s a lot of wasted space on a smaller SSD. And you’ll probably only notice it if you use a disk space analysis tool.
Where These Files Are Stored
At the moment, NVIDIA stores these graphics driver installation files at C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\Downloader. The ProgramData directory is hidden by default, so you have to either view hidden files or type C :\ProgramData into your file manager’s location bar to go there.
To see exactly how much space these files are using on your PC, open the NVIDIA Corporation directory here, right-click the “Downloader” folder, and select “Properties”.
In the screenshot below, these files are only using 1.4 GB of space on our test system. However, that’s just because we cleared these files out a few months ago. We’ve seen this folder balloon much larger in the past.
Previous versions of the NVIDIA software stored these driver installation files at C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Installer2, C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\NetService, and just under the C:\NVIDIA folder.
If you haven’t reinstalled Windows or deleted these files in a while, they may still be stored in these folders. We’re not sure if NVIDIA’s software ever deletes them.What Are They?
If you open the Downloader folder, you’ll see a number of folders with random-looking names. Double-click one of these folders, and you’ll see exactly what’s inside: NVIDIA…
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