After 30 years in computer technical support, cleaning up old printer drivers and old Java gives the best jump in performance over most everything else you can do to tune up an old pc!
These days we are replacing printers pretty often and rarely replace the old printer with the same type of printer. In fact, most of the time I see users replacing their printers with a completely different manufactures printer!
The problem is that the old printer drivers, if not properly removed, cause performance problems. In order to properly remove a printer the user not only must remove the printer and the applications installed with the printer but there is one more step that even most administrators are not aware of. That is removing the drivers themselves.
Control panel, Printers, File, Server Properties, Drivers tab. If an old driver is listed it should be removed. NOTE: If the printer has not yet been removed it will not allow you to remove the driver. In other words, if your kids use a different login then you then you have to go to each user and remove the printer first, then return to this screen to remove the driver! What a pain!
I would love to see ccleaner offer an option to remove printers from ALL the users then the driver from windows as well. This would be nice for businesses with print servers as well. Print servers and workstations printer drivers often become out of sync. If the print server sees that the driver on the workstation doesn't match the one on the server it automatically downloads the newer driver to the workstation. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, the print servers sometimes do this EVERYTIME the users print! Microsoft suggest removing the printer driver from the workstation altogether then try again, however, manually cleaning up an old printer driver is nearly impossible to do manually! Invariably, the printer server will just simply start downloading the drivers again every time the workstation prints.
Please, consider an option to cleanup old printer drivers.