Cleanup orphan/hidden devices

ddelo said:

Ed, deserves credit for a lot of things Brian....for this one too!

Yep. I like Sieber's tools.

Forceflow said:

How safe is it to do this? My nvidia gamestream seems to be creating a _lot_ of virtual devices sometimes, which are only used once. Is it safe to delete these?

First of all, you're not obliged to delete any entries that you're not sure if their deletion creates any issue. That's why the script provides a selection window, to select the entries you want. In the selection window, don't select them.

In my opinion, they're most probably not needed and can be safely removed, but since I have no way of testing it, you can test it yourself.

To do that, first create a full system image in another drive and then run the script and delete them.
If there are performance or any other problems afterwards, just restore the system image and you're back to where you were, but now you know that these entries are essential for proper system operation.

Excellent post. I was wondering the other day what to do about all these hidden devices.

Steve C said:

Excellent post. I was wondering the other day what to do about all these hidden devices.

Thanks Steve. Glad it helped you out!

P.S. It helped me too, as I had forgot about it and you reminded it to me. It proved quite useful on the new laptop I setup the last days!!!

The hidden, orphan devices, that are allowed to be removed and will be shown in that selection window, are the ones that are greyed-out in Device Manager, under the following classes:

• Disk Drives (DiskDrive)
• Portable Devices (WPD)
• Storage Volumes (Volume)
• Universal Serial Bus Controllers (USB)

Very nice idea @ddelo,
I have always been wondering which one to delete, a bit like Russian Roullete . However, I do this manually, within the 4 categories above. Don't feel installing anything extra.
Thanks anyway