Dear Chad,
The *.INF files are used to configure the drivers for your machine.
Typically, they are not used after the drivers have been installed
from the installation media, but it occasionally happens that they
are referred to, esp. when you install new hardware. Windows will
check them to see if it can identify new hardware that has been
installed. If you remove them for hardware that you already have
installed, Windows will sometimes detect already installed devices
as "new hardware", and want you to reinstall the drivers.
So, yes, you can delete most of them. You need to keep the ones
for any hardware that you have, and any hardware that you expect
to install. Since it's not necessarily easy to tell which INF file is for
which hardware, without opening the file, it's probably easiest just
to leave them alone. In my Win98 installation, there's about 14MB
of them... so on a 12GB drive, I feel a little generous, and will leave
them. YMMV. :)
Anthony J. Albert
On 23 Oct 2000, at 2:59, Chad Fernandez wrote:
> Up late, don't quite want to go to bed yet.
>
> In my never ending quest to clean out unneeded files, I see that I have
> a whole directory of *.inf files. Can I safely delete them? Does W98
> use the file in that directory, or does it use the file when the
> hardware is installed and only then? I guess I need to know if I need
> to save the files that correspond to my hardware?
>
> Chad Fernandez
> Michigan, USA
>
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Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
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