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Windows keeps a Device Manager entry for every piece of hardware that’s
ever been recognized by the system, regardless of whether it is
currently present in the machine or was even
set up correctly in the first place. The “View Hidden Devices” option in
Device Manager won’t show you these “residual” drivers. You can force it
to show you everything by going to
My Computer Properties, the Advanced tab, Environment
Variables, and adding a new system variable with the name
“DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES” and a value of 1. Now opening
Device Manager and choosing “Show Hidden Devices” really will
show you everything. Standard practice at the factory is to
use a single image and just move it from model to model,
letting it plug and play all the new hardware along the way.
This leaves you with an impressive list of hardware still in the Device
Manager, but no longer in the system. You also see this to a lesser
degree when you restore a system from an
image you created for backup purposes. These “residual”
drivers can sometimes cause all kinds of weirdness and are best removed
by right-clicking on their entry in the Device
Manager and choosing “uninstall”. This works on Windows 2000/XP (and I
assume Server 2003,
though I haven’t tried it). Anyone running a factory loaded Compaq or
Dell will be amazed at the amount of junk left over from this process.
This also helps finding rootkit viruses entries like srosa.sys, you may
check if deleted or not.
