If you are a very active user of your PC, most often not even a stationary one, but a portable one, such as a laptop or netbook, then it will be useful for you to learn how to remove the printer driver in Windows 11. The reason for this is a situation in which users who work a lot in different places, connect to printers that differ from each other, periodically encounter a problem when similar drivers start to conflict, which affects the connection to the printer or worse, there are problems with the operability of the operating system. In order for such situations to be as small as possible, you need to periodically clean the installed drivers and then, on the one hand, what takes up memory and is not used will no longer be stored on your PC, and on the other hand, the above-mentioned conflict situations related to drivers will not arise.
How do I remove the printer driver in Windows 11?
In general, each user is free to decide for himself how to remove printer drivers, but we recommend doing everything not in one step, but in two:
- Remove the driver from the system parameters;
- We remove the driver package itself.
Such an approach to deletion allows you to clean up the system as much as possible and get rid of what is really no longer required for work, but is stored on the hard drives of the device.
- Go to "Settings" → open "Bluetooth and devices" → click on "Printers and scanners" → now, you need to select the printer that you want to delete → perform the deletion using the "Delete" button of the same name.
- The printer drivers are removed as follows: simultaneously press Win +R → write the printmanagement.msc command, which allows you to open print management.
- Expand the list called "Custom filters" → click on "All drivers" → hover the mouse cursor over the driver that we are going to remove and right-click → select "Remove driver package".
Also, in order to remove the printer driver in Windows 11, it is possible, and sometimes even necessary, to use "PowerShell" - this is especially important if you use the Windows 11 Home edition of the system, since it does not have the above-described print management console.
- Refer to the search field and write there – PowerShell → among the options offered to you, you need to select "Run as administrator" → write a command that allows you to see the list of installed printer drivers in the OS - Get-PrinterDriver | Format-List Name → now, enter the command - Remove-PrinterDriver -Name "Microsoft Print To PDF", but only with the replacement of the name "Microsoft Print To PDF" with the name of your printer.
- Also, if not one of the above methods did not help, then you can do the following: press Win +R at the same time → prescribe - printui /s /t2 → select the printer whose drivers you want to delete → click on "Delete" → in a new window, select "Delete driver and driver package" → click on "OK".
That's how, quite simply, you can remove the printer driver from Windows 11 once and for all, which can really have a positive effect on any device.
