Finding unused Windows Drivers the easy way…

One of the main cause of Windows crashing is device drivers, be they not working correctly due to a bad install, having a new driver replace an old driver etc. In most cases this leads to a blue screen of death and a reboot but in some cases it can just cause windows services to stop working unexpectedly and your left trying to figure out what caused the crash. In my experience it’s mostly due to drivers.

This fix should work on Vista and XP.

So to remove drivers that are corrupting your system.

1. Create a new environment variable
2. Display hidden devices in device manager
3. Uninstall old or unused drivers.

The environment variable you need to create is : devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices

Its value shoule be set to : 1

Then close the windows by selecting ok. Now in Device Manager, in the view menu, select show unused devices.

The device list should populate with new drivers that were not there before. The unused devices are the ones that are greyed out on the icons.

You should be able to remove the device drivers now.