How to remove a printer and its drivers from Windows 8/10

How to remove a printer and its drivers from Windows 8

Press the keyboard shortcut Win+q. Find Printer Management in the section Administrative Tools and launch it.

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Removing a printer

Open Custom Filters, All Printers, select the printer you want to remove and click on Delete.

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Confirm it by clicking Yes.

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Removing drivers

Go to item All Drivers. If you have installed your driver from a standalone installer, it is recommend you to Remove Driver Package… . If you have simply selected the driver from a list offered by Windows when installing the printer, it is recommend you to Delete it.

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If you are trying to remove the driver without removing the printer beforehand, or the driver is used also by another printer than the one you removed, the system won’t allow you to remove the driver.

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If you resolved the previous problem or you haven’t encountered it, system will show you which packages and drivers will be deleted.

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After you click on the button Delete, the packages and drivers will be erased from the system. By clicking on the button OK on the summary window, the process of removing drivers will be finished.

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If you removed all drivers you wanted, close the Print management.

Remove Network Printers from Windows via Registry Editor

Step 1: Click on Start, Run and then type in regedit and press Enter. This will open the registry editor.

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Step 2: Navigate to the following key in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER – Printers – Connections

Here you should now see a list of all network printers with the server name first, then a comma, and then the name of the actual printer.

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Go ahead and click on the printer in the left menu and press the Delete button or right-click and choose Delete. Unfortunately, that’s not all! You also have to delete the printer from one more location in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE – SYSTEM – CurrentControlSet – Control – Print – Providers – LanMan Print Services – Servers – Printers

Now under the servers key, you should be able to expand it and see the name of the print server that actually hosts the printer you want to delete. Go ahead and expand the print server key and delete the printer from the list.

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Now close the registry editor and reboot your computer. The undeletable network printer should now be gone! Note that the method above is just for network printers. If you have a local printer and want to remove it the same way via the registry, you need to go to the following registry keys below:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\ Windows NT x86\ Drivers\Version-3\

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers\

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