How to Remove Printer Driver from Windows 11? | Ways to Delete Printer Driver on Windows 11

The Trillion dollar giant Microsoft has unveiled its latest update for the most used desktop operating system, Windows 11. This brand new update has got all the world on its feet with phenomenal performance scores, brilliant new design, intuitive user design, and overall consistent performance. With over 1.3 billion users who are now able to get hands-on this new upgrade are pleased with the results and are thoroughly enjoying the better productive and creative processes.

Launched on 24th June 2021, it was officially released for downloads during mid-December the same year. The Windows 11 is a strong response by Microsoft to the competition by other tech behemoths, Apple and Google. The healthy ongoing competition keeps getting tougher and is a win-win situation for everyone, as the customers get value for their money and the manufacturers stay in the lead by providing the better product, overall evolving further together.

• What is a Printer Driver?
• Why remove the added Printer Drivers?
• Procedures to Remove a Printer Driver on the Windows 11
  • Removal of Printer Driver by using Settings
  • Removal of Printer Driver by using Print Management
  • Removal of Printer Driver by using Command Prompt
  • Removal of Printer Driver by Using PowerShell Commands

What is a Printer Driver?

A printer driver is basically a piece of computer software that allows your system to link with your printer. It helps in translating the instructions sent from the specific application software or operating system into a language or form which the printer understands or reads. It allows the printer to respond to those particular instructions properly. There are a plethora of different types of printer and software models, which have their own style or method of encoding data.

Mostly allowing any type of printer or software to respond, there has to be a translator or communicator present between the two devices, and the printer driver acts like one. Printer Drivers perform many tasks, and one of the tasks is to help convert your document or the label template into a Page Description Language that the printer can understand and respond to. These types of languages describe how the content of a page is and how that specific content is arranged or placed in order.

All of this is done in a series of geometric shapes and lines which could be described using several mathematical equations. The printer driver also communicates to the printing settings your printer should make use of while printing the document. There’s a possibility that printing settings by default are similar to the ones stored in the printer driver itself. Similarly, the selection of settings you have chosen could be intentionally selected to print a specific document.

Why remove the added Printer Drivers?

Brand new innovations in the technological world, with the enhanced gadget capabilities, the entering of Cloud-based technology, we are now able to print documents with ease from anywhere across the world. Consider this – you can get the printing work done by just connecting the smartphone to your computer.

Some users keep adding new printers to their systems habitually and then end up forgetting about it completely. The increase in the number of printing devices connected to your computer, makes you notice a significant increase in overall computer resources consumption. This could reflect in the computer’s performance, as it might start running slow or performing extremely poorly. To avoid this situation, where your system is becoming a bit inefficient, it is then necessary to discard all the recently added Printers on the system.

Also, See:

• How to download and Install Windows 11
• How to align Windows 11 icons to the left

Procedures to Remove a Printer Driver on the Windows 11

There are four different ways that could help you remove or uninstall the Printer Driver from the device on Windows 11. They are namely – Settings, Print Management, Command Prompt (CMD), and PowerShell.
Let us explore these different ways in detail. Removal of printer and driver from the system is a two-step procedure.

Removal of Printer Driver by using Settings

The simplest of the four mentioned methods, this is a complete guideline of stepwise explanation on how to remove the printer driver using the Local Computer Settings –

• Select the (WinKey + I) to launch the Settings app.
• Press the ‘Bluetooth & Devices’ option and jump towards the right side of the screen.
• You will find the ‘Printers & Scanners’ option, selecting it will take you to-
• a list of all the added printers appearing on the next page.
• Select the Printer/Printers which you no longer wish or require on your Windows 11 device.
• Press the ‘Remove’ button.
• If a case arises wherein any prompt appears asking whether you want to proceed with the specific setting, press ‘Yes’.
• Printer Driver gets uninstalled from your device.

You will see the changes after restarting your device, which makes the changes effective.

Removal of Printer Driver by using Print Management

Print Management is an extremely useful tool that allows you to remove any printer driver on your system. The process is as follows –

• Select the (Win + S) keys to Launch the Search Window
• Type out “Print Management” on the search window bar, and select the first result.
• Open the Custom Filters options and select All Drivers.
• A list of all Printer drivers appears on the centre page.
• Choose the Printer driver which you want to uninstall or remove, and press ‘Remove Driver Package’.
• Similar to the procedure above, a prompt will appear asking whether you want to proceed with the selected driver’s uninstallation.
• Press ‘Yes’

The selected Driver/Drivers are uninstalled right after pressing yes. If you want to uninstall any additional drivers, you can re-follow the above-mentioned steps and achieve the desired result again.

Removal of Printer Driver by using Command Prompt

You can remove or uninstall the Printer Driver by running some codes on the CMD or Command Prompt. Follow these steps to Launch Command Prompt –

• Select ‘Yes’ when the account Control Window shows up.
• Type out “wmic printer get name” on the search bar
• Hit Enter
• Similarly, type “ printui.exe /dl /n “your_printer_name” “ and press the  Enter key
• The selected printer driver will get uninstalled as soon as you are done following the procedure. Even though it will reflect after you restart your computer.

NOTE-  the command line typed above which says “your_printer_name” is where you actually have to type your specific printer’s name.

See More: How to Enable the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to Install Windows 11

Removal of Printer Driver by Using PowerShell Commands

This scenario is mentioned just in case where you might prefer using PowerShell instead of running the code on Command Prompt. Refer to the following steps to achieve the desired result –

• Select Keys (Win + X) and choose the option ‘Windows PowerShell (Admin)’.
• Press the Yes button when the UAC prompts option gets displayed on the screen.
• Type out the cmdlet “Get-Printer | Format-List Name” along with an ‘Enter’ key when the blue console pops up.
• When you get the list of all the printing drivers, type out “Remove-Printer -Name “your_printer_name” “

• Press Enter.
• Restarting your computer will help you see the effective changes.

NOTE-  the command line typed above which says “your_printer_name” is where you actually have to type your specific printer’s name.

Conclusion

These were the methods by which you can get rid of excessive and unwanted Printer Drivers from your computer. Let us know if you have any queries or suggestions!