This has probably been asked before but
I was checking my device manager to see if everthing was working right and turned on show hidden devices.
It showed a number of duplicates and drives ghosted. a couple were from when I was combining
some usb drives and another for a printer I got rid of last year.
Should I delete/uninstall them or just leave them? Do the these ghosts have any effect on
the system?
I doubt they are duplicates if you look more into the detailed properties, not that it matters as they are not being used and have no effect on the system.
Action > Scan for hardware changes may get rid of some. All rather trivial.
thanks, I was just doing some spring cleaning.
Those hidden devices are merely ones that have been set up in the past but are currently not connected.
- 'Scan for hardware changes' will have no effect on them.
There is no need to delete them. If you did but later reconnected them the entries would be recreated.
- If you deleted the entry for that old printer then you would be simplifying the system & saving a very small amount of storage space by deleting its driver.
- If you deleted the USB drive entries then they would be recreated when you next connected them and there wouldn't be any storage space saving anyway because the drivers are provided by Windows itself.
So, in short, no need and hardly any benefit.
Denis
If you want to remove phantom/non-connected devices from DevMgr, there is no better tool than Uwe Sieber's Device Cleanup Tool. Grab it from his "Tools for Windows" page. I use this all the time myself. I've written an Admin Toolkit Item description for this tool at Win10.Guru, if you'd like to learn a little more about it.
HTH,
--Ed--
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