What you can’t see,you can’t troubleshoot that.The device manager suits this logic perfectly.
Basically,all the devices present in Windows XP are listed in device manager,right?
The answer is no.Along with the devices that are present,we can encounter two more types of devices : hidden and ghosts.
Hidden devices are mostly the really old and legacy types that don’t get listed by default in XP.
Ghosts or phantom devices as the name suggests are the old memories of devices long gone 🙂 – these are devices that were removed but weren’t properly uninstalled from XP.
While examining any device for resources conflict in XP,chances are you will be able to really tell if this is caused by any of the above two categories of devices listed above.
Let’s take a look at how to go about displaying these mysterious at first glance system devices.
To list hidden devices:
1.Open Device manager – Start>Run>devmgmt.msc
2.Choose View>Display Hidden Devices
Devices you never knew start appearing on the list.
Showing phantom devices requires modifying the environment variables.Let’s create a system-wide variable :
1.Open the environment variables tab by right-clicking on My Computer>Properties>Advanced>Environment Variables.
2.Under the system variables,hit New and enter the values – devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices and 1.
This will enable phantom devices to show up in the list of device manager(Device manager will display option of displaying phantom devices now).These will be gray in color and will most probably have a long list of non-PnP drivers.
All done.
Hope this post gives some insight on the concept of hidden and phantom devices in XP.
Peace.