How to uninstall hidden devices, drivers, and services

Contributor Icon Contributed by midnite_a  
Tag Icon Tagged: Windows installation  

These steps works with Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista and Windows 7.


Ever have those drivers or devices that just won’t go away even though you’re sure you’ve uninstalled them? Or, say you replace your old 100Mbps network card with a faster Gbps adapter. But, you can’t re-assign it the same IP address because your system insists there is still an adapter installed with that same IP address and you forgot to remove the driver before removing the old card (which is now in your little brother’s pc)?

To get rid of that unwanted driver, device, or service:
1) Open the “Start” menu and choose “Run…”
2) Type in “cmd” (without the quotes) and click “ok”.
3) At the cmd prompt, type in “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1″ (without the quotes) and press enter. (Note that nothing seems to happen–this is ok. We are actually setting an environment variable which is going to help us to see hidden devices)
4) On the next cmd prompt line, type in “devmgmt.msc” (without the quotes) and press enter. This will launch the Windows Device Manager Console.
5) In the Device Manager Console, from the “View” menu, select “Show Hidden Devices”.

Now, as you expand the different drivers and devices in device manager you will see not only the items that Windows currently detects as installed on your pc (these are the usual items displayed), but you will also see drivers, devices, and services which have been loaded in the past but were not uninstalled or are not currently started. You can find your offending device, right-click, and choose “uninstall” to remove it from the system completely.

Be careful though; you should note that non-loaded devices, drivers, and services are “grayed” out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should delete all of them. Only remove items you know you don’t need. And, be careful that you don’t change too many devices or you might need to re-activate your Windows installation.

Last thing, if you accidentally exit the Device Manager Console you will need to start over again at the cmd prompt. To close the cmd prompt window, type “exit” (without the quotes).

 

33 Comments -


  1. Steve said on October 29, 2008

    These instructions are an unnecessarily complicated way to do something very simple. Just go to the device manager, click View, and select “show hidden devices”. What you have not done is explain what to do when clicking “uninstall” results in a message “failed to uninstall the device. the device may be needed to boot up the computer.”

  2. Jan said on November 8, 2008

    Steve, your suggestion will show hidden devices, but not the non-present devices. And the reason you get the message “failed to uninstall the device. The device may be needed to boot up the computer” may be due to dependency on a non-present device. For me, setting the environment variable before starting the device manager enabled me to uninstall the non-present device first, and then I was also able to uninstall the hidden devices that before refused to uninstall (at least most of them …)

  3. Xiotion said on January 3, 2009

    THX FOR THIS!!!!! REALLY HELPFULL

  4. MARS666 said on April 11, 2009

    very goooooooooooooooooooooood
    this helped me to uninstal lots of old drivers on XP
    thx man

  5. grace said on April 29, 2009

    thanks for this little recipe. but what i need is what should i do in order to show my hidden drive. e.g. “drive d”. please help me. tanxc

  6. donovan said on May 6, 2009

    owowowowowowoowoowwowowow thanks alot i wish i could give a kiss to who wrote this and poasted it thanks alot for reel your awesome

  7. Martha said on June 14, 2009

    Have Windows XP – have lost sound – get msg that there is no audio
    device installed (multimedia audio controller) and that it is being used
    by another source. Anyone have any solutions?

  8. TechMasterJoe said on June 14, 2009

    save the following in a notepad – quotes
    “echo
    set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
    devmgmt.msc
    pause >nul
    ”
    save as hidden.bat
    .bat not .text
    then dbl click on the bat file to run cmd and open devmgmt.msc
    all on auto

  9. Barbara Gallicano said on July 7, 2009

    I can’t find out what PPSCAN is in hidden devices. It has a yellow bar next to it. Nothing else has this. I lost the sound but have sound when I use the printer that tells me that the printer is printing and when print ends. I don’t know if I should remove it. I tried RegTool and they went into my computer but evidently didn’t see it or left it. I can’t get an answer from them and they refunded my money.
    Thank You
    Barbara

  10. Anonymous said on July 10, 2009

    Need a way to identify unused devices in Device Manger. I have several entries in the “Universal Serial Bus Controllers” and “Human Interface Devices” that are grayed-out and not used. I think this happens when devices are moved from one USB port to another (like I do). Is there a way to identify each of the device entries without having to plug each device in? The problem is that I have more devices than I have USB ports available and swapping devices in and out is confusing. And deleting all of the grayed out ones would cause a lot of reinstalling of the “good” ones.
    Basically how to determine which of the following unused/grayed-out are valid:
    13 grayed-out HID-compliant consumer control devices;
    20 grayed –out HID-compliant devices;
    23 grayed-out USB Human Interface Devices.

  11. Garry said on July 17, 2009

    Hi: Followed instructions but still did not find hidden drivers/Root Kits;
    “C:WINDOWSwin32k.sys:1″;”Hidden driver”;”Object is hidden”
    “C:WINDOWSwin32k.sys:2″;”Hidden driver”;”Object is hidden”

    Am I doing something wrong, or is there another technique I can use?

  12. Anonymous said on August 7, 2009

    Good

    Thanks

  13. Anonymous said on August 26, 2009

    Thank you very much buddy………… Thanks a lot for this great work……..

  14. ScottieAy said on August 28, 2009

    I know this is a bit late, but this applies to Vista and 7 as well. If you Right Click on My Computer, or Computer, Select Properties, Advanced or Advanced System settings, and Click on Environment Variables, Hit the New button at the bottom under system variables and enter devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices as the variable and the value as 1. This way you will always have the hidden values!

  15. Anonymous said on October 7, 2009

    good bit of info. still need info on how to remove the drivers. keeps saying “may be required to boot up computer”. any help would be greatly appreciated

  16. Christine Pendergrass said on December 6, 2009

    i can go one face book and to other games onn my computer and listen to radeio and watch t.v program everything good as soon as i get on cafe world it freezes whats the matter

  17. satisfy blogger said on January 13, 2010

    wow really appreciate it

  18. jay said on February 24, 2010

    works with vista 32bt

  19. Anonymous said on May 12, 2010

    Thanks midnite_a
    The method whihc u mentioned is clear, bu the theproblem in my case is that u see few adapters with yello mark over them. I cannot uninstall them, it says to reboot the computer. I m afraid your method doesnt help. Did u understand the situation in my case. I even tried to do it from rehistory editor but still shows, thanks

  20. Jane Book said on May 25, 2010

    2010 Please don’t ever lose this article. It helped me tonight!! and I noticed it was posted over 5 years ago. Thank you thank you thank you!

  21. Anonymous said on June 8, 2010

    Thanks for all the kind words!!! I’m glad we could help.

  22. Nandagopal said on July 21, 2010

    Very useful to enter device manager console

  23. Pavan Kumar E said on January 15, 2011

    unbelievably awesome..!!!if possible,do contact me for a treat from me..confupavan on fb..

  24. Anon said on January 16, 2011

    Dont forget to run as Admin

  25. Bubak said on February 27, 2011

    Helps me not… I uninstall driver shown but when I connect device it is detected and driver is installed again. I want to delete newer driver and install older. It is not possible because Windows says “no better driver found for device” or something similar (I’m using WXP in czech).

  26. Jaggu Da said on March 19, 2011

    good

  27. Sawbona said on March 27, 2011

    Hello:

    Thanks a lot …
    Please ‘do’ keep this article around, it has been very usefull to me.

    In my third W200Pro SP4 transplant to yet another mobo/chipset/cpu things started getting a bit complicated.

    When I seached for a solution and finally came across this post, I undertsood why.

    Can’t begin to tell you just how much old/not present hardware was piled up within ‘hidden devices’, with multiple instances of storage volumes, USB controllers, SCSI drives, CD and DVD Rom units, monitors, IDE and SCSI controllers, etc.

    Now, it’s all squeaky clean … =-)

    Once again, thanks a lot for sharing the knowledge.
    Best regards,

    CIV
    Buenos Aires
    Argentina

  28. Anonymous said on July 11, 2011

    If you right-click My Computer or Computer, select Properties, Advanced, or Advanced System Settings, click on environment variables, system variables play in the bottom under the “New” button, input variables and the value 1 DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES. This way you will always have hidden value.

  29. Vegard said on July 27, 2011

    i got  a problem here i dont know what too remove and anyone add me on skype : Vegaboa and help me please , cuz i got weird disorted laggs and i belive its a hidden device in my computer that makes the lagg 
     so please help

  30. moey said on August 23, 2011

    hello ive been having an issue i want to remove my nokia e71 driver from the PC running win 7 x86 (32bit) but i dont know what the driver is called

    ive done the show unused drivers command and all that aswell but i dunno where the Nokia e71 driver is located in Device manager

    i would really appreicate help
    thanks in advance

    moey

  31. Hector said on October 1, 2011

    When I type in devmgmt.msc it says not recognized as an internal or external command.

  32. gsi said on October 17, 2011

    does anyone ever experience with Windows Multipoint Server? I’m having trouble installing my barcode reader. But if I run on safe mode the device works fine. Something to do with USB device mapping or something.

  33. A Good Guy said on January 9, 2012

    Thanks a ton! This helped so much! An HP Printer driver was corrupted on install and there wasn’t a log in the Program Files to uninstall. So this worked wonders! Had to uninstall each shown driver manually, but as long as it stops the DEP from flagging the driver we’re good.

 

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