Where Is Device Manager In Windows 7

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

Y'all should merely need to utilize the Device Manager when troubleshooting your calculator's hardware and managing its drivers, but it's an of import system tool that you lot should know how to use.

Opening the Device Manager

The easiest way to open the Device Manager on whatever version of Windows is by pressing Windows Key + R, typing devmgmt.msc, and pressing Enter.

On Windows 10 or 8, you can also right-click in the bottom-left corner of your screen and select Device Manager. On Windows 7, you lot can open the Control Panel, click Hardware and Sound, and click Device Manager nether Hardware and Printers.

Viewing Your Installed Hardware

Past default, the Device Manager displays a listing of your installed hardware, sorted by category. You can expand these categories to view which hardware you have installed in your computer. If you ever forget the verbal model number of your video card or even your difficult bulldoze or DVD bulldoze, yous can chop-chop notice that data in the device manager.

Notation that some hardware devices don't appear in this list past default. Yous tin view them by clicking View and selecting Show hidden devices. This will display a diverseness of "non-plug and play drivers," including low-level system drivers included with Windows and drivers installed by 3rd-party software.

Windows does non display certain types of subconscious devices, even when you enable the Show hidden devices option. "Ghosted" devices, such as USB devices that aren't connected to your calculator, volition non appear in the list. To view them on Windows 7, Vista, or XP, you'll accept to launch the Device Manager in a special mode.

Get-go, open up a Command Prompt window. Run the following commands in information technology:

gear up devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=ane

outset devmgmt.msc

The Device Manager will open and will now bear witness all subconscious devices when you lot select Show hidden devices from the View menu. You tin use this trick to remove drivers associated with your old, disconnected hardware. This hidden feature was removed in Windows 8, and so viewing such "ghosted" devices is no longer possible.

Identify Devices That Aren't Working Properly

To place devices that aren't working properly — possibly because of problems with their drivers — look for the yellow triangle containing an exclamation bespeak over a device'southward icon.

Correct-click the device and select Backdrop to view more than data virtually the problem. The problem could exist a driver effect, a system resource conflict, or something else. If information technology's a driver problem, you can mostly install a new driver for information technology from the Driver tab in the Properties dialog.

Disable a Device

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

As an example, let's say we don't like the abrasive system beeps that come from our calculator. These beeps come from the speaker on your computer's motherboard.

To disable them, click the View carte du jour and select Show subconscious devices. Expand the Not-Plug and Play Drivers section, right-click the Beep driver, and select Properties.

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

This setting just affects Windows, so yous may hear a beep while booting upwardly. This is a troubleshooting feature that allows your motherboard to beep at yous if issues occur.

Manage a Device'due south Drivers

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

The settings that matter virtually for troubleshooting are the Driver settings. Afterward right-clicking a device and selecting Backdrop, click the Driver tab. Y'all'll notice information about the currently installed driver and buttons for controlling it.

Driver Details: View details about the exact location of the driver files existence used by the device on your system. You shouldn't demand this pick.
Update Commuter: Install an updated commuter. Windows allows you to search online for an updated commuter or manually choose a commuter that has been downloaded to your system, just as y'all tin when installing devices unremarkably. Searching for an updated commuter may help if the commuter is old and outdated. If you lot want to manually cull a custom, downloaded commuter for a device, you'll do information technology from hither.
Coil 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 could hunt down the old driver and manually install it, but this button provides a quick way to downgrade your driver. If this push button is grayed out, the commuter hasn't been updated, and then there's no previous driver to roll 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. Annotation that this may non remove all driver files, so uninstalling the drivers from your Control Panel is a better idea, if this is possible. Y'all may accept to reboot your calculator after doing this. This should just be necessary if you lot want to purge certain drivers from your system and try setting up the device and its drivers from scratch.

The Device Director also warns y'all well-nigh resource conflicts, but you should run into resources conflicts very rarely on modern systems. The above information should encompass just virtually everything y'all would want to do with the Windows Device Director.