Device Manager normally displays only non-Plug and Play devices, drivers, and printers when you click Show hidden devices on the View menu. It doesn’t display hidden devices that are installed but not connected anymore to the computer (also called “ghosted” devices). So, basically in Device Manager, there are two types of hidden devices in addition to the devices that are displayed; Typical, hidden devices like non-Plug and Play devices and Phantom (Ghosted) devices that are not connected to the computer.

As you go on attaching and removing different devices to Windows, the number of ghosted or hidden devices increases. This causes different types of errors related to driver install. It also hampers system performance (though often negligible), since Windows tries to find all these devices at start-up. There is a simple workaround to display these ghosted devices in Device Manager. After displaying them, you can remove ghosted devices from your computer.

There is also a simple free application which helps you remove all hidden devices in one go. More on the app later in this article. First, lets see how we can make Device Manager display Hidden (ghosted) devices. From now on, I’ll interchange and refer to hidden devices as ghosted devices or vice versa. [Read more...]