Mashed Articles

Understanding exactly what’s running on your PC at any one time is crucial for optimising performance, troubleshooting problems, or just about anything else you might want to do.

Yet Windows scatters the information you need across a host of different tools, including Task Manager, the Services applet, Device Manager and various system information tools, to name only a few.

You don’t have to put up with this though, because some very useful third-party tools have appeared to fill the gaps. Device Remover (which you’ll find on issue 308′s SuperDisc – click here order the issue) is one of the most comprehensive around.

Device Remover doesn’t just show you the programs running on your system – it also lets you explore your devices, drivers and Windows services. Device Remover can quickly point you to the Registry entries for drivers or services to tell you more about them. It can carry out all kinds of actions: choose a service, say, and you’ll be able to stop, start, pause, resume, restart, disable, delete or back it up in a couple of clicks.

In case that’s not enough, Device Remover is also packed with tools to help you troubleshoot the most complex of PC problems, from power management issues to troublesome broken filter drivers.

You need to watch what you’re doing; choosing the wrong option in a program this powerful can have very undesirable side-effects. You need to have System Restore running and a complete system backup to hand. That said, if you’re careful and follow our advice then the risks are low, and Device Manager will be able to help you solve all kinds of issues with the minimum of effort.

Device Remover highlights any faulty drivers it comes across in red, so you can immediately see which devices need your attention.

Device Manager

Launch Device Remover and you’ll see the ‘Devices tree’ tab, which looks and works a lot like Device Manager. Expand the ‘Display adapters’ section of the tree, for example, and you should see your graphics card. Click this and its properties will be displayed over on the right: if the device isn’t working properly then some of the status messages here might tell you more.

Click ‘View | Device remover devices display mode | Show only hidden/detached devices’, and the picture becomes more interesting. Expand the ‘Non-plug and play driver’ section of the tree you’ll probably see a host of references to software you thought you’d removed long ago, while other sections – ‘Portable devices’, say – will include hardware you’ve not seen in some time.

Sometimes these remnants can prevent you from reinstalling a later version of a software package or hardware driver. If you recognise a device or application that you’re sure isn’t installed, and that you’ve had problems trying to reinstall, you can try checking the devices here and pressing [Delete] to remove them.

Be careful, though – if you accidentally remove something important then your system could be damaged to the point where it won’t even reboot. So choose with extreme care. If in doubt, just leave the device alone (it’s probably not consuming any system resources, so cleaning it up won’t help you very much).

Elsewhere, don’t miss the ‘Print device tree’ button on the toolbar. Click this and you’ll get a hard copy of your current device tree (spread over a lot of pages – 21 on our test PC). If your system starts misbehaving later, you can refer to this and use it to identify what might have changed.

There’s another useful extra in the form of Device Remover’s ability to display device events in real time. To try this, click the ‘Device events’ button on the toolbar, then plug in a USB flash drive or similar device, and the program will show you what’s happening: the device appearing, being recognised, being assigned a driver letter and more.

These event descriptions are technical, but that doesn’t matter: the value comes in seeing an extra layer of information that isn’t normally visible. If a USB device isn’t recognised, for example, just open the ‘Device events’ window, plug in your hardware and see what happens. The events log just might provide the clues you need to solve the connection problems.

The Device Events window displays hardware events as they happen, which is very handy for troubleshooting tricky USB connection problems.

Drivers and services

Clicking Device Remover’s ‘Drivers and services’ tab displays all your installed Windows services and device drivers. Anything running is displayed in green, while inactive services and drivers are displayed in red. Initially the list is sorted by service name, so these will be jumbled up, but if you’d like to focus just on the services that are running, for example, just click the ‘Service status’ column header and Device Remover will arrange the list accordingly.

You’ll usually only venture into this tab if there’s an issue with a particular service. Does your PC occasionally suffer major printing problems, for instance? If so, it could be something to do with the Print Spooler service: right- click this, select ‘Restart’ and the service will relaunch itself. Once it’s done, try printing again and see if there’s any change.

If a service is engaged in some resource-hungry activity, you might also be able to click ‘Pause’ to stop it temporarily (choose ‘Continue’ later when it’s OK to resume). You can even stop a service entirely, but it’s unwise to try this unless you’re sure that it’s not doing anything important, otherwise your PC may crash.

Sometimes you might not recognise a particular service at all. Is it from some application that you’ve uninstalled? Could it be malware? Right-click the service name and you’ll find a few options that might help. At the simplest level, you can use the ‘Show properties’ option, which may reveal details like the author, or any copyright messages.

If that’s no help then selecting Open Service Binary Location will display the folder where the service executable file is located, or you might choose ‘Open Registry key’ to display related Registry data, both of which may provide more clues as to where the file came from.

Perhaps most useful of all, clicking ‘Open online search | Service name’ will launch a browser window to display any search engine hits for the service name. By default, Device Remover uses Bing, but this can be tweaked according to your needs: just click ‘Tools | Options | Application Options’ and enter the URL you need in the ‘ApplicationPreferredOnlineSearchEngine’ box.

Task Manager

Clicking the ‘System processes and handles’ tab displays all the processes currently running on your PC; it’s something like the Device Remover version of Task Manager, with some handy extras. Choosing a program will display more information in the right-hand Process box, for example (there are 20 memory-related figures alone). The ‘Loaded modules’ box will show you all the DLLs and related files that a process is using, while the ‘Open handles’ box displays any files and Registry keys that it has open.

Again, if you don’t know where a particular process came from, then you can right-click it, and choose an ‘Open online search’ option to look for search engine hits related to the program name. If you discover it’s something undesirable then hopefully you’ll be able to install it. But if the process is malware and stubbornly resists your efforts, then a right-click “Mark file for deletion on system boot” should wipe it out when you next restart.

“Backup all modules for process” is another unusual right-click option, which can create an archive file based on a process executable and all its dependent DLLs. You might then be able to use this to run an application on another PC, even if you don’t have an installer for it.

There are even a few window manipulation options available. Would you like your Firefox window to be ‘always on top’ of other application windows, for instance? Device Remover allows you to do this in a couple of clicks.

Device Remover makes it easy to see your hardware-related Registry keys, and you can use the program to back them up in seconds.

Bonus tools

There’s no shortage of diagnostic power here, but Device Remover has even more to offer in the form of some unusual system tools.

Broken filter drivers, for instance, can cause some odd PC behaviour, particularly with optical drives: Windows may suddenly think your DVD writer is a DVD ROM, say, or stop recognising the drive altogether. The operating system provides no special support for examining filter drivers, but fortunately Device Remover has stepped in. Clicking ‘Tools | System | Show filtered devices’ lets you browse the filter drivers on your system, and a ‘Try to find bad/ broken filters’ dialog will attempt to locate any that aren’t working.

Elsewhere, a ‘Show device power states’ dialog displays power-related information relating to each of your devices: it’s technical stuff, but if, say, some item of hardware isn’t waking up properly after your restarting your laptop from a sleep state then this may help you figure out why. And by right-clicking a device you can even send it a ‘wake up’ request manually, which might be enough to get it working again without the hassle of rebooting.

There’s also ‘Back up all memory loaded drivers’ – an easy way to back up your drivers that could come in very handy if you’re planning to reinstall Windows. There’s no need to track down the original driver discs – just point Windows at the backup location. Advanced tools include a WMI/WQL Query interface, a Windows Protected Resources browser and a ‘Translate Windows error codes’ applet that takes those strings of numbers and explains what they mean.

There are also quick shortcuts to more than 50 useful Windows tools, so whether you want to launch a Control Panel applet, open the command line or just create a system restore point, you’ll find an appropriate option somewhere on the Tools menu.

If this sounds overwhelming, then you’re right – taken together, Device Remover’s array of tools can be confusing. But you don’t have to use every one of its feature, or even most of them. In reality, any one of its modules – the ability to watch device events in real time, for example – could be enough to help you solve a tricky technical problem. Don’t worry about Device Remover’s apparent complexity – download a copy, give it a try and find out exactly what Device Remover can do for you and your PC.

This MakeIt feature is taken from PC Plus Issue 308 – on sale now. To view the expanded feature with additional tips and information, as well as nine more fantastic MakeIt features click here.