Windows 7: Managing Your Hardware with Device Manager (part 1)

Device Manager’s default display is a tree-like outline that lists various hardware types. To see the specific devices, click the plus sign (+) to the left of a device type. For example, opening the Disk Drives branch displays all the hard drives, Flash drives, and memory card slots attached to your computer, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Device Manager organizes your computer’s hardware in a tree-like hierarchy organized by hardware type.

Controlling the Device Display

Device Manager’s default view is by hardware type, but it also offers several other views, all of which are available on the snap-in’s View menu:

• Devices by Connection— This view displays devices according to what they are connected to within your computer. For example, to see which devices connect to the PCI bus, on most systems you’d open the ACPI branch, and then the Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System branch, and finally the PCI Bus branch.

• Resources by Type— This view displays devices according to the hardware resources they require. Your computer’s resources are the communications channels by which devices communicate back and forth with software. There are four types: Interrupt Request (IRQ), Input/Output (IO), Direct Memory Access (DMA), and Memory (a portion of the computer’s memory that’s allocated to the device and is used to store device data).

• Resources by Connection— This view displays the computer’s allocated resources according to how they’re connected within the computer.

• Show Hidden Devices— When you activate this command, Device Manager displays those non–Plug and Play devices that you normally don’t need to adjust or troubleshoot. It also displays nonpresent devices, which are those that have been installed but aren’t currently attached to the computer. (However, see “Showing Nonpresent Devices in Device Manager” to be sure you’re seeing all devices.)

Viewing Device Properties

Each device listed in Device Manager has its own properties sheet. You can use these properties not only to learn more about the device (such as the resources it’s currently using), but also to make adjustments to the device’s resources, change the device driver, alter the device’s settings (if it has any), and make other changes.

To display the properties sheet for a device, double-click the device or click the device and then select Action, Properties. The number of tabs you see depends on the hardware, but most devices have at least the following:

• General— This tab gives you general information such as the name of the device, its hardware type, and the manufacturer’s name. The Device Status group tells you whether the device is working properly, and gives you status information if it’s not .

• Driver— This tab gives you information about the device driver and offers several buttons to managing the driver. See “Working with Device Drivers.”

• Resources— This tab tells you the hardware resources used by the device.

Showing Nonpresent Devices in Device Manager

I mentioned earlier that if you have any non-Plug and Play devices that you want to work with in Device Manager, you select View, Show Hidden Devices.

That works, but it doesn’t mean that Device Manager is now showing all your devices. If you have any devices that you’ve installed in Windows, but that you regularly connect and then disconnect (such as a USB digital camera), Device Manager won’t show them. (Windows describes such devices as ghosted devices.) That makes a bit of sense, because it might be confusing to see nonconnected hardware in Device Manager.

However, what if you’re having a problem with a ghosted device? For example, suppose Windows hangs or crashes every time you connect such a device. Ideally, you’d like to use Device Manager to uninstall that device, but you can’t because Windows goes belly-up whenever you connect the nasty thing. What do to?

The solution to this kind of problem is to force Device Manager to show ghosted devices. Here’s how:

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

devmgmt.msc