Duplicate Entries In Device Manager

Hello All,

I just looked at Device Manager on my Windows 8.1 Pro desktop PC and when showed hidden devices I noticed that I have several duplicate entries for the same hardware. Here is a screenshot:



The only thing I can think of that might have caused this was that I just did a clean install of Windows. When the installation was complete I then installed all the drivers that came with my MSI motherboard and some of these drivers were the same and so Windows makes a copy and adds -1, 2, etc. to the name? If the drivers were duplicated why wouldn't Windows just overwrite the old one instead of copying it? Seems to me that would just fill up the registry with excess entries.

Can anyone tell me why these are there and if it's safe to remove the ones that are hidden? More generally, is it safe to remove hidden devices (duplicates or not)?

Thank you,

Jan

I really would not worry too much about it. Leave them be. Otherwise when you remove them, you are going to be back here asking why your OS is not working correctly.

I would right click the duplicates and delete them. The duplicates appear to be grayed out anyway. Reboot and see if they come back. I'd bet that they don't.

pcgeek11 said:

I would right click the duplicates and delete them. The duplicates appear to be grayed out anyway. Reboot and see if they come back. I'd bet that they don't.

Click to expand...

Those are not duplicates. One is for the System, the other is for the user.

Hello Jan,
Those are called ophan device drivers and often created when users plug/unplug the external devices such as external HD, USB Stick, USB Network Adapter, USB Headphone, Smart Phone etc... into the USB port of the PC or re-arrange the cables/slot of the internal devices.

Eventually, you'll have a long list of hidden orphan drivers and yes it is advisable to uninstall those to keep your system clean.

You can do as suggested by pcgeek11 for each of those grayed out drivers (right click on it->Uninstall). However, there's a program to do this kind of work for you.

Download: Drive Tools for Windows Cleanup .Right click on it and run as Admin. This will cleanup those orphan drivers from the device manager tree. After run, open device manager and click on the right most button on the toolbar to rescan, those should be gone.

Hope this helps.

broe23 said:

pcgeek11 said:

I would right click the duplicates and delete them. The duplicates appear to be grayed out anyway. Reboot and see if they come back. I'd bet that they don't.

Click to expand...

Those are not duplicates. One is for the System, the other is for the user.

Click to expand...

Not true.

Delete the poor little orphans.

Youre looking at all drivers installed under that catagory

If you're going to delete any of the extras, then delete them all since you cant know which driver is currently being used by windows, its showing you all the drivers it installed, some have slight variation from the other.

This happens when windows has to re-detect the hardware and installs a current but slightly different driver than the previous connection.