Hello all, for a'while I had been wondering why there were so many grayed out and seemingly out of place drivers on my laptop. For them to be grey, I assume they simply are not being used at the moment. I believe they may have been the leftovers from the stress testers and the tech team that worked on my laptop before its deliverance to me.
I would like to know whether or not these said drivers can be removed. If anyone has any answers, please respond.
-Arcturus Fyr
I think you may have "Show Hidden Devices" checked under the view menu. It seems like this will show devices that were once connected but are not connected now, like a particular USB drive for instance.
If you right click on a grayed out device and select Properties it will probably say that the device is not currently connected. If it is not a device that you will use again I think you can right click and select uninstall to get rid of it.
However, my system shows quite a few of these hidden devices and I am going to leave them as is since my system runs fine. I am not sure that uninstalling these driver entries will not cause a problem down the road. Maybe someone with more experience in this area will pipe up with some wisdom...
I think you may have "Show Hidden Devices" checked under the view menu. It seems like this will show devices that were once connected but are not connected now, like a particular USB drive for instance.
This is correct and definitely you can uninstall them, those are called orphan devices. For example, under "Disk Drives", at one point you did connect the HD xxxx630 to different sata port then later on you connect it to another sata port so it became orphan.
You can download Drive Tools for Windows Cleanup , right click and run as Admin.
Uninstall those orphan devices can improve system performance since Windows does not have to look for those devices.
Thank you all for the suggestions. @topgundcp I will try the cleanup utility that you suggested, however, I missed some other parameters of the list I posted.
I am however a bit worried though, it seems drive tools removed two USB ports that were used before I disabled them. Is this normal and is there anyway to restore those ports that may have lost?
As for reference I'll upload two pictures, one before Drive Tools was used, and one after it was used.
Please respond as soon as possible.
EDIT: Nevermind, the first one doesn't even show my USB drivers, but there were two grayed out ones that functioned before I disabled them.
I uninstalled all the grayed out ones on my PC. I haven't had any problems. I think if you plug the same flash drive into a different port every time it will make a new drive. I had several with the same name. I put a flash drive in all my ports, then I uninstall all the ones that were left that were grayed out.
Hello everybody, it seems I need some more help. I found more grayed-out drivers that I do not know what to do with. These ones are in my "Audio Inputs and Outputs" driver section and there seems to be "duplicates" of these said drivers that are grayed-out. Can anyone tell me whether or not they, if at all, can be removed safely?
Here's an image for what I'm referring to.
Glad if someone can help.
