How to delete data about USB Flash drives in the Windows registry. How to remove old usb device drivers from Windows? Clean your computer of flash card drivers

Good day to all and all sorts of other differences. Glad to see you again.

During the life of a computer (or laptop), we constantly connect any USB devices to it, be it a keyboard with a mouse or flash drives, disks, scanners, printers, and so on.

Not everyone knows, but each connected device leaves its mark on the system in the form of a driver. And it doesn’t matter whether it is universal or not, but the fact remains.

The result of having this trace can be very different and sometimes lead to problems in connecting or determining this (or another) device itself in the future (especially if the original driver was not correctly defined or configured).

Today I want to tell you about a program that allows you to interact with USB drivers in a deep and powerful way.

Let's get started.

Maximum USB information with USBDeview

As you already understood from the title (and subtitle), we will talk about the program. This miracle of a programmer's thought can see and tell about all USB devices connected to your computer (or laptop) ever (and now).

It doesn't matter if it was a flash drive mobile phone, printer, camera, ax or anything else, and it does not matter when it was, provided that after that you did not reinstall the system.

Moreover, you can see almost all the information that was received from the device and its driver, starting from the banal name and ending with the version / file of the driver, the version of the firmware consumed by energy, the date of the last connection / disconnection to the computer, the type of port used and the devil knows than else.

And not only look, but you can interact in every possible way with existing drivers and records of information from them. You can disable, enable, remove the driver, watch detailed information, find a registry branch, open a disk with a device (if it is, say, a flash drive), make reports and .. all sorts of different things.

You can download. Installation is not required - just unpack the archive. The version that is in the archive, in fact, is indicated in the screenshot below.

How to take off with it? Everyone can come up with an application for themselves. For example, personally, I repeatedly "repaired" with it incorrectly installed (or deleted unnecessary) versions of drivers for the mobile before flashing it (Odin did not respond until the required driver version was installed, which, by the way, was not installed yet via USB Deview primary will not be deleted). And I also had to extract the firmware version of the printer and some other devices in order to further manipulate it.

So it goes.

Afterword

In general, I think that the program will be useful in the arsenal of any IT specialist (and not only). Keep in mind and keep it at hand - sometimes with the help of it in a couple of clicks you can solve a lot of rather intricate problems.

As always, if you have questions, additions, thoughts, and so on, then welcome to comment on this post.

So Windows time stores many backups in the system, temporary files, old drivers that will gradually take up space on your hard drives. Of course you can to free up space on your hard drive, but what if the old drivers of any device interfere with the installation of new versions? Particularly problematic are wireless mice, keyboards and others USB devices a, who sometimes do not want to work until we remove the old drivers and install new ones.

Drivers are necessary little applications that are needed to connect any device and make it work. IN Windows system very large database of drivers for different types devices: printers, mice, sound cards, fees, etc. Some manufacturers release their own versions of the driver, which are necessary for operation and are not always in the database. windows driver can work with any device. To do this, we need to remove old unnecessary driver versions and install new ones from the manufacturer.

How to uninstall a previous version of a driver

Every time the driver is updated time after time, then the old backups drivers remain in the system, thereby clogging HDD and interfere with the installation of new driver versions. For removing previous versions Write the driver in the "Search" (near Start) Command line or cmd, right click on it and run from administrator name, then in the window that opens, enter the command cleanmgr.

Place a check next to Device driver packages and click OK. All old driver packages will be purged.

How to uninstall old device drivers in Windows

Most often, relatives remain hidden installed drivers which the above method will not remove them. Hidden drivers remain in the system and when a new device is detected and installed old version driver, and not a new one, which causes various errors when installing new drivers and inoperability of devices.

• Press button combination Win+R and enter the following command devmgmt.msc to open Device Manager.

• In device manager, click View > .

If for some reason they are not displayed, then see below how to fix the hidden display of devices.

We see weakly allocated devices in the picture above, these are hidden drivers that sometimes interfere with us.

• To remove old hidden drivers, just right-click on it and Delete.
• If you have the option to check the box, please check the box.

How to reveal hidden device drivers in the manager

The command is related to show hidden drivers in device manager, old Windows versions XP, 7.

Run command line as administrator and enter the command:

• SET devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices = 1

You can go to device manager and try to show hidden ones.

Good afternoon, dear readers of the blog site, today I want to tell you how to delete data about USB flash drives in the Windows registry. This article is a continuation of the article. All information about any USB media ever connected to a computer is stored in system registry. If a lot of flash drives are connected to the computer different models and manufacturers, then over time a lot of garbage accumulates in the registry. As a result, the process of detecting and connecting a new device begins to take considerable time and slows down the system.

Exit one. It is necessary to periodically clean the registry keys that store data about connected flash drives and other USB drives. Clearing these partitions will speed up the connection new USB devices and the operation of the system as a whole.

Cleaning should be done with system program regedit. It launches like this.
Start - Run - Regedit

Registry sections that store data about any USB drive ever connected to a PC - Flash drives, external hard drives, as well as cameras, phones, flash players and other devices that, when connected to a PC, were recognized as external USB stick. Here you can delete all subkeys with the Disc prefix.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USBSTOR
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\USBSTOR
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Enum\USBSTOR

From the screenshots it can be seen that hubs and HDDs were connected in the same way through the hub

If you don’t want to clean it manually, then there is free software, such as USB Oblivion. Run the utility

Check the box Perform a real cleaning

We see that everything is completed and many entries have been deleted from the registry. Let's check the registry. Please note that there is no USBSTOR folder.

Well, let's look at the next step with the USBDeview program, everything is also clean.

Here, dear readers, is where data about your flash drives is stored, so if you need to delete something, then start.

Almost every user connects a phone, tablet, reader, flash drives and external HDD. When working with these devices, Windows installs their drivers. At the end of operation, they are not deleted from the computer (that is, they gradually accumulate) and, just like temporary files, unnecessary entries in the registry litter the system.

In addition, if devices are disconnected from USB port incorrectly (pulled out without software shutdown by the "Extract" function), then the installed drivers not only remain in the system, but also continue to function. Because of this, they often become the cause of a software conflict in the process of connecting another USB device (the system “does not see” the device, gives errors, hangs).

This article will help you avoid all these troubles: it will tell you how to remove the driver of an unused USB drive or gadget from operating system completely how to automatically uninstall all USB drivers.

Removal by regular means

Surface cleaning

1. Open the Start menu.

2. Right-click on the "Computer" panel that appears. Select "Properties" from the list of commands.

3. In the column on the left, click "Device Manager".

4. In the dispatcher window, in the horizontal menu, open the "View" section and click "Show hidden devices".

5. Open the "USB Controllers" directory.

6. Remove the old or unused driver: right-click on its name → click "Delete".

Deep cleaning

1. Hold down the Win key and press the Pause/Break key. Or open: Start → right-click "Computer" → Properties.

2. In the window that opens, in the left panel, click " Extra options systems."

3. On the Advanced tab, click the Environment Variables button.

4. In the upper block, click "Create".

5. In the "New User Variable" window:

• in the line "Variable name" enter - devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices;
• in "Variable value" - 1.

6. Click OK in the variable panel and in the Environment Variables window.

7. Return to the system properties window (Win + Break) and click "Device Manager".

8. In the manager, open: View → Show hidden…

9. Click the "Update configuration ..." button (the last one in the panel).

10. Icons unused drivers in the manager are grayed out (that is, you can remove this driver). Open the following directories one by one and remove unnecessary elements (right-click on the name → Delete):

Non Plug and Play Device Drivers

Advice! In this directory you can also remove old drivers, installed by programs that are already uninstalled from Windows (for example, the Comodo firewall package).

This section of devices displays installed drivers for flash drives, readers, hard drives. Transparent object icons indicate that they are not used (not connected). So, you can safely get rid of them.

11. When cleaning is complete, restart your PC.

Automatic removal by USBDeview utility

1. Copy this link into the address bar of your browser - http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html#DownloadLinks (official website of the utility). And then press "ENTER".

2. On the opened page:

• if you have a 32-bit system, click the first link "Download USBDeview";
• if 64-x, the second is "... for x64 systems".

3. Unpack the downloaded archive: right-click on it → select "Extract all ..." → in the "Unpacking ..." window, click "Extract".

4. Open the unzipped folder. Run the USBDeview executable with administrator rights.

5. The utility window displays a list of all drivers installed in the system. Disabled elements are marked with red "chips".

To remove a driver from Windows, select it with a mouse click, and then click the Trash icon in the USBDeview panel. Or right click on it and select context menu"Uninstall Selected Devices".

Note. In addition to the removal function, USBDeview provides the user with the ability to disable / enable the driver, view its properties.

Removing all USB device drivers

Global cleaning of drivers can be done with the DriveCleanup utility (download link - http://uwe-sieber.de/files/drivecleanup.zip).

1. Unzip the archive downloaded to your computer.

2. If you have 32-bit Windows, open the "Win32" folder, if 64, respectively, "x64".

3. Run the "DriveCleanup" file as an administrator.

Once launched, the utility will automatically clean up. At the end of the procedure (when the message “Press any key” appears in the console window), press any key.

Good luck with your system setup!