OK, hate to be a noob here, but I've a system here that simply will not show the Non Plug and Play Drivers category. XP SP3 Of course, I do set devmgrshownonpresentdevices=1 and select view hidden devices in devman.
- Expand Non-plug And Play Drivers
- Non Plug And Play Devices
- Non Plug And Play Drivers Not Showing In Device Manager
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What is Plug & Play Drivers ?
With old Windows versions you had to install a hardware only after switching off your computer. And if you were to plug in a hardware like your Printer into the printer port or insert your keyboard or mouse in to the slot in the back of your computer you had to restart your computer because Windows tried to recognize or search for a device driver only when you restart your PC. To avoid this unwanted PC reboot, Microsoft came up with a novel idea. USB or Universal Serial Bus was the name given. With this port you could plug in any hardware that is USB compatible into it. New versions of Windows was modified to search and recognize a USB device the moment it is plugged into the USB slot. These hardware were made in such a way that they tell Windows what hardware they are and which drivers are required to be loaded to get them working.
But soon hardware manufacturers started making changes to their Plug and Play or USB hardware and the generic drivers that comes packed with Windows failed to run them or could not give all the designed features to the user because of the limitations of the generic device drivers. Today Windows XP/Vista and Windows 7 comes preloaded with most of the Plug and Play Device Drivers. However, some hardware like Plug and Play USB Devices, Printers, Modems, Phones, scanners, external hard disks or storage mediums like cd roms, dvd roms etc may come with their own Device Driver files. This is because the hardware manufacturer wants to give many more features than what the generic windows plug and play drivers can give your hardware. Most of the plug and play hardware works with the Windows plug and play drivers. But many of them fails to even get recognized by Windows so even the generic drivers will not get installed for them. In such cases you may have to insert the Driver CD or USB for installing the correct model specific drivers.
How Plug and Play Device Drivers get Automatically Installed?
The plug and play devices have been desingned to identity themselves to Windows immediately on being plugged into the USB port, giving their exact manufacturer, hardware type, model numbers and other details that Windows require to load the necessary generic drivers. So when you connect a plug and play device into the USB slot or other port, Windows tries to identify the hardware by sending a query to the hardware or device identifies itself to Windows by sending necessary details. This will not happen if the autorun feature is disabled on that USB or port. Also if the generic plug and play device driver is not present in Windows version installed in your PC or Laptop, then it will ask you for a location of the drivers or to insert the driver disk.
Why Update Drivers if Windows has already Installed Plug and Play Drivers?
It is advised that even if Windows installs plug and play drivers it is always better to use the Drivers that came with the hardware beacuse the Windows generic plug and play drivers are as old as Windows whereas the driver disk your hardware manufacturer provided has the better drivers. But again it is better to go to the original hardware manufacture website and download the latest drivers for your hardware. Use an Automatic Driver Download Tool to update all your Windows plug and Play drivers also.
All the changes you make are stored into your Windows Registry. A few of the registry paths where you can find your Plug and Play settings are given below.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServices
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEHARDWARERESOURCEMAPPnPManager
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesPlugPlay
Windows Registry is where all the setting that you make or change in your computer saved into. Registry is the nerve center of your Computer without which Windows or any software that you use cannot function. Windows Registry is used by Windows and all the software that you install, remove and use every day like your word processor, your notepad, your video editor, your internet explorer etc. All of these applications read and write entries continously to the Windows registry making it larger every day. But some software write wrong entries or over write some entries made by another software or Windows itself. This causes errors that can make your PC or Laptop to Freeze or hang up and even crash with total data loss. Experts recommend using Windows Registry Cleaner to remove errors from Windows Registry because clean PC registry ensures error free, high computer performance.
How does Plug and Play Drivers run in your Computer?
Most device drivers including Plug and Play Drivers are designed to run in the Ring 0 or Kernel level. Some of the devices drivers are designed to run as File System driver, and some like Network adapter. Some Win32 Drivers can run as a service in a stand alone process and some Win32 drivers runs in a shared address space with other services at the some time. Some drivers are software enumerators. For a user it does not matter how the driver runs as long as it the correct driver for a device or hardware that has been installed, otherwise your PC may freeze up or crash at times when ever you try to use the wrong driver installed with the hardware.
Plug and Play Device Drivers start running with bootup of your PC. Some driveres that runs as a Windows service may start up only when a service is requested. For example you give a document print command. This triggers Windows to start the printer service to get executed. This may take some time. So often printer manufacturers like HP printers makes the drivers to get loaded with your PC startup itself which is actually not required. You can safely turn them off, because the moment you give print command these plug and play drivers will get loaded into your PC Memory. Some drivers are made to start automatically and some plug and play drivers may required to be started manually. But if a plug and play device is assigned the disabled code then that particular plug and play driver may not load at all. So you need to be careful when you change your group policies in Windows or editing the Windows registry settings.
At times the Plug and play hardware fails to work because of many reasons. One is that the connector is not properly inserted. Or a connector pin is bent or broken. This makes Windows unable to recognize the plug and play hardware and it fails to load the appropriate driver giving a warning 'unrecognized hardware'. Also at times Windows does recognize the hardware but does not have the correct driver available and again it may give out the same warning. Sometimes you may have pulled out the hardware without ejecting or stopping the service and Windows may be unable to locate the hardware for which the driver is already loaded into the memory which commonly happens in case of most USB drives and USB devices. This may also damage the USB devices permanently.
What is WHQL Certified or Signed Plug and Play Drivers ?
It is always better to install Signed Windows Plug and Play Drivers because these are WHQL or Windows Hardware Quality Labs Certified Drivers. When you install unsigned drivers you may get a warning. If a signed or WHQL certified driver is not available, then you may use an unsigned driver as long as you are sure that the driver is provided by the manufacturer along with the hardware and is designed to work on your Windows version.
How do I get Latest WHQL Certified Plug and Play Drivers?
You need to search the website of each of your Plug and Play hardware manufacaturer and download the model specific drivers. This may be very difficult and time consuming. An alternative is to use an Automatic Driver Download Tool specifically designed to Automatically Update all Your Plug and Play Drivers in 3 minutes. Driver Detective was first released in 1996. Today there are more than 126 million PC users from over 100 countries world wide who use Driver Detective to Update Drivers. Driver Detective is an intelligent software that can detect all your installed Windows Drivers, hardware, operating system etc and Download the latest WHQL Certified, Model Specific Drivers from the original manufacturer websites. Designed for Windows 7 XP ME Vista 2000 98 Driver Detective is Free to Download
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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.
You should only need to use the Device Manager when troubleshooting your computer’s hardware and managing its drivers, but it’s an important system tool that you should know how to use.
Opening the Device Manager
The easiest way to open the Device Manager on any 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 can open the Control Panel, click Hardware and Sound, and click Device Manager under Hardware and Printers.
Viewing Your Installed Hardware
By default, the Device Manager displays a list 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 exact model number of your video card or even your hard drive or DVD drive, you can quickly find that information in the device manager.
Note that some hardware devices don’t appear in this list by default. You can view them by clicking View and selecting Show hidden devices. 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.
Windows does not display certain types of hidden devices, even when you enable the Show hidden devices option. “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 way.
First, open a Command Prompt window. Run the following commands in it:
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
start devmgmt.msc
The Device Manager will open and will now show all hidden devices when you select Show hidden devices from the View menu. You can use this trick to remove drivers associated with your old, disconnected 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 problems with their drivers — look for the yellow triangle containing an exclamation point over a device’s icon.
Right-click the device and select Properties to view more information about the problem. The problem could be a driver issue, a system resource conflict, or something else. If it’s a driver problem, you can generally install a new driver for it from the Driver tab in the Properties dialog.
Disable a Device
Let’s say you 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. 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. Whatever your reason, you can disable individual hardware devices from the Device Manager.
As an example, let’s say we don’t like the annoying system 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 Non-Plug and Play Drivers section, right-click the Beep driver, and select Properties.
Expand Non-plug And Play Drivers
Click the Driver tab and set the Startup Type to Disabled. You won’t hear beeps from within Windows anymore. (Note that, for most types of hardware devices, you can generally right-click them and select Disable to quickly disable them.)
Non Plug And Play Devices
This setting just affects Windows, so you may hear a beep while booting up. This is a troubleshooting feature that allows your motherboard to beep at you if problems occur.
Manage a Device’s 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 most for troubleshooting are the Driver settings. After right-clicking a device and selecting Properties, click the Driver tab. You’ll find information about the currently installed driver and buttons for controlling it.
- Driver Details: View details about the exact location of the driver files being used by the device on your system. You shouldn’t need this option.
- Update Driver: Install an updated driver. Windows allows you to search online for an updated driver or manually choose a driver that has been downloaded to your system, just as you can when installing devices normally. Searching for an updated driver may help if the driver is old and outdated. If you want to manually choose a custom, downloaded driver for a device, you’ll do it from here.
- Roll 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 button is grayed out, the driver hasn’t been updated, so there’s no previous driver to roll back to.
- Disable: Disable the device, preventing it from working in Windows until you re-enable it.
- 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 better idea, if this is possible. You may have to reboot your computer after doing this. This should only be necessary if you want to purge certain drivers from your system and try setting up the device and its drivers from scratch.
The Device Manager also warns you about resource conflicts, but you should see resource conflicts very rarely on modern systems. The above information should cover just about everything you would want to do with the Windows Device Manager.
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