Clean out old drivers in XP|Vista after hardware upgrades

photodudephotodude Salt Lake, Utah Member
edited November 2009 in Science & Tech
I just did a Mobo upgrade and decided to get rid of the old drivers; catch 22 non-active drivers are hidden in the device manager. I came across this great article on how to clean up drivers on the system.

basically type the following in the admin CMD
SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1
devmgmt.msc

Then under the device manager: View > Show hidden devices

you will see your hidden, inactive devices, as grayed out icons

The rumor is by cleaning up the device manger you can resolve some stability issues and increase performance slightly.

I expect this might work in win7 as well
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