How To Get To Device Manager Windows 7

The Windows Device Director is an important troubleshooting tool. It displays all your installed hardware devices and allows you to view which ones take bug, manage their drivers, and even disable specific pieces of hardware.

You should but demand to utilise the Device Managing director when troubleshooting your figurer'south hardware and managing its drivers, but it's an of import organization tool that you should know how to use.

Opening the Device Managing director

The easiest style to open the Device Managing director on whatsoever version of Windows is past pressing Windows Cardinal + R, typing devmgmt.msc, and pressing Enter.

On Windows ten or 8, you can as well correct-click in the bottom-left corner of your screen and select Device Manager. On Windows 7, you lot can open up the Control Console, click Hardware and Audio, and click Device Manager nether Hardware and Printers.

Viewing Your Installed Hardware

By default, the Device Manager displays a list of your installed hardware, sorted by category. Yous tin can expand these categories to view which hardware you accept installed in your computer. If you lot always forget the exact model number of your video bill of fare or even your difficult drive or DVD bulldoze, you tin quickly find that information in the device manager.

Note that some hardware devices don't appear in this list by default. You tin view them by clicking View and selecting Bear witness hidden devices. This will display a variety of "non-plug and play drivers," including depression-level system drivers included with Windows and drivers installed by 3rd-party software.

Windows does not display sure types of hidden devices, even when y'all enable the Show hidden devices selection. "Ghosted" devices, such as USB devices that aren't connected to your computer, will not appear in the list. To view them on Windows 7, Vista, or XP, you'll have to launch the Device Manager in a special mode.

Start, open a Command Prompt window. Run the post-obit commands in it:

ready devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

first devmgmt.msc

The Device Manager will open and will at present evidence all hidden devices when y'all select Show subconscious devices from the View menu. You tin can use this play a trick on to remove drivers associated with your onetime, asunder hardware. This hidden feature was removed in Windows 8, so viewing such "ghosted" devices is no longer possible.

Identify Devices That Aren't Working Properly

To identify devices that aren't working properly — possibly because of bug with their drivers — look for the yellowish triangle containing an exclamation point over a device's icon.

Right-click the device and select Properties to view more than information about the problem. The problem could be a driver issue, a system resource conflict, or something else. If it'due south a commuter trouble, you tin by and large install a new commuter for information technology from the Commuter tab in the Properties dialog.

Disable a Device

Let's say y'all want to disable a device completely. Perhaps your laptop's touchpad is malfunctioning and sending phantom events, moving your mouse cursor when you don't want it to. Maybe yous never employ your laptop'south webcam and you want to disable it at the arrangement-level to exist certain no malware can use your webcam to spy on you. Whatever your reason, yous can disable individual hardware devices from the Device Manager.

As an example, permit's say we don't like the annoying organisation beeps that come from our computer. These beeps come from the speaker on your computer's motherboard.

To disable them, click the View menu and select Show hidden devices. Expand the Not-Plug and Play Drivers section, right-click the Beep commuter, and select Properties.

Click the Driver tab and set the Startup Type to Disabled. You won't hear beeps from within Windows anymore. (Notation that, for nearly types of hardware devices, you tin can generally right-click them and select Disable to quickly disable them.)

This setting just affects Windows, and so you may hear a beep while booting up. This is a troubleshooting feature that allows your motherboard to beep at y'all if bug occur.

Manage a Device'due south Drivers

A device's properties window contains information and settings that may be specific to that type of hardware. However, you shouldn't need to look at most of the information or options here.

The settings that matter nigh for troubleshooting are the Commuter settings. Later right-clicking a device and selecting Properties, click the Driver tab. You lot'll find information nearly the currently installed driver and buttons for controlling it.

Driver Details: View details most the exact location of the driver files being used by the device on your arrangement. You shouldn't demand this selection.
Update Driver: Install an updated driver. Windows allows you lot to search online for an updated driver or manually choose a driver that has been downloaded to your system, but as yous can when installing devices unremarkably. Searching for an updated driver may help if the commuter is sometime and outdated. If yous want to manually choose a custom, downloaded driver for a device, you'll do it from here.
Curl Back Driver: Revert to the driver the device was previously using. If you've updated the driver to a new version and the hardware isn't working quite right, you should downgrade the driver. You lot could hunt downward the old commuter and manually install it, but this button provides a quick way to downgrade your driver. If this button is grayed out, the driver hasn't been updated, so there's no previous driver to ringlet back to.
Disable: Disable the device, preventing it from working in Windows until you re-enable information technology.
Uninstall: Uninstall the drivers associated with the device from your system. Note that this may not remove all driver files, so uninstalling the drivers from your Control Panel is a meliorate thought, if this is possible. You may have to reboot your computer later on doing this. This should only be necessary if you want to purge certain drivers from your organisation and try setting up the device and its drivers from scratch.

The Device Manager also warns you near resources conflicts, but yous should see resource conflicts very rarely on modern systems. The above information should cover just about everything you would want to exercise with the Windows Device Managing director.