Show non-present devices in Device Manager

Time and again I forget the environment variable that makes the Windows device manager show devices that are not connected to the system, but installed anyway. I note it here now to have point for myself to find it more easily in the future :)

The easiest way to use it (if you don't want to configure it permanently through the "System" applet in the control panel) is to first start a command line (cmd.exe) and then type the following commands:

set DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1
devmgmt.msc

In the device manager that starts up, you still need to enable the "Show Hidden devices" option in the "View" menu ("Ansicht/Ausgeblendete Geräte anzeigen" in a German Windows).

This will make the device manager show all devices that you installed but do not use anymore, e. g. USB drives you just connected once, mice and keyboards that have long been replaced etc. Sometimes those entries cause problems when you plug a similar device in, so deleting them might solve problems in that area.

Comments

TuneUp said…
Great post, Daniel! It’s true that a lot of PC users forget about how useful the Device Manager is for tasks such as fixing hardware problems, installing drivers, looking for new hardware or, as your blog post suggests, showing non-present devices. I wrote a blog post on seven uses for the Device Manager with a tutorial for each, you can find out more here: http://bit.ly/hZZEkz
Wed Apr 27, 07:16:00 PM GMT+2
Anonymous said…
¡Great post! Other options to view hidden devices in Windows: http://www.sysadmit.com/2015/09/windows-eliminar-dispositivos-ocultos.html
Mon Sep 28, 01:47:00 PM GMT+2
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SAXParseException: -1:-1: Premature End Of File - Misleading error

Today I had to look at a piece of code a colleague had written, using my XPathAccessor class. She used it in a servlet which gets XML formatted requests. As those are generated by an external 3rd party tool we agreed on some XML schema definitions. Everything they send us needs to conform to its corresponding schema, each reply we send gets validated against a different set. In order to allow independent testing on either side, we provided a little test kit that allows testing our system without having to set up a servlet engine. Basically it just takes a file, reads it into a String and hands that to the handler. First it gets parsed without validation. This is necessary to find out which type of request we were send (the address is the same for all of them). After the root element is known, it will be read again, this time using the right schema to verify the request. Once that is done, some reply is put together and sent back to the client. So far, so good. When I looked at
Read more

Amiga 500 Restoration: A501 Memory Expansion

Image
The previous posts were mostly about cosmetics. This one is more technical, dealing with the repair and some preventative maintenance of the A501 memory expansion card. If you are curious to learn more about the retrobrighting of the computer’s case, don’t worry — I’ll get back to that at a later time. This is the third post in a series about restoring an Amiga 500 back to its former glory. Here are all of them so far. I’ll try to remember to update this in all related entry. 2017-12-24:  Amiga 500 Restoration 2018-01-05: Retrobrighting I 2018-02-05: A501 Memory Expansion 2018-02-05: Mouse and Mainboard Maintenance Amiga Memory — The Basics When the Amiga 500 was first introduced, it came with 512KB of memory. That was already double the amount the original Amiga 1000 had, but still not a whole lot. Especially when developers started to get familiar with the audio and video capabilities of the machine, RAM became a limiting factor in what you could do. Merely copying a single
Read more

Amiga 500 Restoration: Mouse and Mainboard Maintenance

Image
With the memory expansion board fixed in the last post, I needed to perform more electronics fixes, this time to get the mouse back in working order. Notice that I did this in March 2018, but somehow forgot to write the post. So with a little delay, here it is. This is the fourth post in a series about restoring an Amiga 500 back to its former glory. Here are all of them so far. I’ll try to remember to update this in all related entries. 2017-12-24:  Amiga 500 Restoration 2018-01-05: Retrobrighting I 2018-02-05: A501 Memory Expansion 2018-02-05: Mouse and Mainboard Maintenance To Click, or Not To Click When I won the ebay auction, I quickly realised that finding an Amiga compatible (modern) monitor would be a problem. Luckily, my 2011 Panasonic plasma TV has a SCART input, which I remembered to be compatible with the Amiga RGB output. Resisting my first urge to build a cable myself, I instead ordered one for a few Euros from another ebay seller. While waiting for it to arrive,
Read more