Displaying Unused Device Drivers

display unused device drivers

Last week, I was trying to debug a network problem that was being experienced by one of my virtual machines. This VM had a bit of “history” having been moved several times between different hosts, and having originally been a physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion. Anyway, it wasn’t working correctly, and I couldn’t find anything obviously misconfigured. So, after digging around the registry and googling, I came across an article discussing how to show all installed device drivers, even those that have been disabled. Once I displayed the devices, I was able use Windows device manager and uninstall unneeded drivers, until voila! the machine started working again. Here are my steps:

  1. Enable the display of all devices:
    • Run cmd.exe to get a DOS command prompt
    • Type the following command: set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
  2. Open device manager:
    • Start button | Control Panel | System
    • Goto the Hardware tab
    • Click the “Device Manager” button
  3. Expand or uninstall:
    • Expand the various sections (e.g. “network adapters” or “display adapters”…)
    • Locate the potential problem driver, right-click and select the Uninstall menu item
    • Reboot the machine and test

I happened to be debugging in Windows XP. But, I tested the above procedure on Windows 7, and it works essentially the same. The only difference is that unused device drivers are not greyed out but instead have a little “down arrow” icon indicating they are disabled. For further information about this topic, see: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/315539.