Disable Hidden Devices & no hidden devices

By ThisSiteHasLostItsCharm
in Tips, Tweaks & Customization

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Grand Master

ThisSiteHasLostItsCharm

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Posted (edited)

heres a good tweak, in device manage disable devices that are either unused or are uesless;

devman.jpg

^ in the pic i've disabled the netmeeting video driver since i dont have netmeeting installed, also the packet sched driver (quality of service crap) and entensions on my nic which i dont need, also unseen in the pic i've disabled

terminal server drivers, ras drivers, ndis proxy, unused com ports, ubs ports.

if your unsure on what to disable heres a list of devices/drivers that can be safely disabled on an xp computer;

NIC:

Direct Parallel

WAN Minport IP (i read on site all can be disabled but the ip, this appears to be wrong)

WAN Miniport L2TP

WAN Miniport PPPOE (disable if isp don't support it)

WAN Miniport PPTP

Hidden Devices:

ATM ARP Client Protocol

Generic Packet Classifer

mnmdd

NDProxy

Remote Access Auto Connection Driver

Remote Access IP ARP Driver

Remote Access NDIS Tapi Driver (u gotta set it to disable in the properties as well as disabled on the device itself otherwise it stays active)

Ports:

COM & LPT ports

System Devices:

terminal server drivers

Usb:

any hubs not in use

Edited by RanCorX2
Grand Master

ThisSiteHasLostItsCharm

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if a device isn't present the device won't be in device manager. ;) unless its been removed and left the "!" mark behind then indeed the driver would not be used. What i'm saying is those things are present on my system i've just disabled them. I don't benchmark anything, its just a good idea to disable things you don't use and drivers that have been left behind by uninstalled progs but are still active. i.e. the netmeeting driver and partition magic 8 driver were still active after i removed the programs. ( i deleted the pm8 driver obviously but with the xp ones i just disabled and NOT deleted) anyway you don't need to benchmark to notice improvements, just take a peek at task manager i've noticed i have a few extra mbs after xp has hit the desktop and the page file is smaller at first load,

before tweak pagefile 80-90mb after 72-75, free mem before 404-407 after 411-412. desktop appears a little quicker and boottime slightly reduced, only about a sec or 2 i guess.

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clonk

Posted
Posted

I think you two are a little confused. These aren't real devices. They are software that microsoft chose to work in the same manner that hardware does, and 'drivers' are installed for them. You could think of this moreso as disabling processes rather than disabling hardware. I cannot comment on whether this process would give any noticable performance increase though, as I am inclined to believe these 'components' are only using memory and processing power when actually called for use. Especially since windows treats them as hardware. When was the last time having a bunch of PCI cards installed in your computer slowed it down?

Grand Master

ThisSiteHasLostItsCharm

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Posted (edited)

under hidden devices those gray icons are all services much like ones in services.msc, just check the properties of one it'll have a option to disable, start, stop etc. So disabling some may yeld a small performance boost for other services etc, and if a device like a usb hub has nothing connected to it its still enabled and the drivers are still loaded, so disabling will stop the drivers from being called for that device and resources will be used somewhere else.

Edited by RanCorX2
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neosapience

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if a device isn't present the device won't be in device manager.? unless its been removed and left the "!" mark behind then indeed the driver would not be used.
This is not true. If you check 'show hidden devices' you will see a list of any and all devices that have ever been connected to your system. Ones that are not currently connected will have a transparent icon. The drivers for these devices are not loaded and are therefore not degrading system performance.
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I think you two are a little confused. These aren't real devices. They are software that microsoft chose to work in the same manner that hardware does, and 'drivers' are installed for them.

I'm not confused at all. I know quite well the difference between a virtual device and a real one. Disabling devices that aren't there wont do anything, it will just prevent them from working if you ever plug them in. If it's a virtual device (such as the network ones he's shown there) it MAY improve performance, or it may just confuse the hell out of windows and cause problems.

Hence my question on benchmarking and memory usage.

(please note that I'm not refering to any archaic versions of windows).

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