Do you need to reload windows when changing cards?

[gargus]

Ive seen a lot of conflicting ideas about reloading windows when changing graphics cards and not sure if like driversweeper is good enough or if I need to scorch the earth.

I had a radeon card on a newly formatted system, after several driver reloads and such I found out the issue was the card itself so I got a new nvidia card. I uninstalled the old ati drivers, deleted the ati folder and I ran driversweeper. Is that enough or should I really reload windows?

I played WOW today for about 2 hours and didnt have any issues.

 

[night_wolf]

if it works then dont format! but if you get a problem or your system is running strange then you should format!

 

[Wolfshadw]

I've been building systems for a number of years now. On several occasions, I've switched from ATI to NVidia (and back again). I do not recall a single time I've ever needed to do a complete format and reinstall. Not for just swapping graphic cards.

But as Night_Wolf suggests, if you do run into problems, a format and reinstall isn't going to hurt anything (assuming you have all your data backed up).

-Wolf sends

 

[captaincharisma]

i did the same thing a few years ago and I never had any problems whatsoever from it to go to those extremes. mind you I replace an NVIDIA card with another NVIDIA card but did reinstall the drivers. it is possible if you didn't use drive sweeper there may have been some issues

 

[dextermat]

+1 no format.

cleaning up the drivers is enough.
If someone get trouble and need to reformat because they change video card : they didn't do something right

 

[inzone]

No format is necessary unless there is an error in the process and you end up messing up the registry or Windows system files. Sometims if you go into the start menue and you see the drivers folder there you might have an uninstall option which is better than control pannel. First step would be to uninstall the card in device manager then the drivers in control pannel.