After right-clicking a device and selecting Properties, click the Driver tab. The settings that matter most for troubleshooting are the Driver settings.
Whatever your reason, you can disable individual hardware devices from the Device Manager. Perhaps you never use your laptop’s webcam and you want to disable it at the system-level to be sure no malware can use your webcam to spy on you. Perhaps your laptop’s touchpad is malfunctioning and sending phantom events, moving your mouse cursor when you don’t want it to. Let’s say you want to disable a device completely.
If it’s a driver problem, you can generally install a new driver for it from the Driver tab in the Properties dialog. The problem could be a driver issue, a system resource conflict, or something else.
Right-click the device and select Properties to view more information about the problem. To identify devices that aren’t working properly - possibly because of problems with their drivers - look for the yellow triangle containing an exclamation point over a device’s icon. Identify Devices That Aren’t Working Properly This hidden feature was removed in Windows 8, so viewing such “ghosted” devices is no longer possible. You can use this trick to remove drivers associated with your old, disconnected hardware. The Device Manager will open and will now show all hidden devices when you select Show hidden devices from the View menu. To view them on Windows 7, Vista, or XP, you’ll have to launch the Device Manager in a special way.įirst, open a Command Prompt window. “Ghosted” devices, such as USB devices that aren’t connected to your computer, will not appear in the list. Windows does not display certain types of hidden devices, even when you enable the Show hidden devices option. This will display a variety of “non-plug and play drivers,” including low-level system drivers included with Windows and drivers installed by third-party software. You can view them by clicking View and selecting Show hidden devices. Note that some hardware devices don’t appear in this list by default.