Sometimes device driver maintenance can be a pain in the wrong place, esp in Windows. XP is good with USB devices with automatic detection and configuration, but it’s not so good with removing them. The device drivers are not removed automatically and they create a havoc in your system on a longer run. My office laptop came with pre-installed XP and it’s been running for past 3 years and it has seen it fair share of new hardware. For a automation engineer it’s a nightmare to add devices knowing that somewhere something is going to wrong because of your unused drivers. Also every time your OS boots up, it loads your unused drivers too until you physically uninstall them. Below is a procedure to remove your unused device drivers from Windows XP.

1. Go to System properties dialog box from your control panel or press [Win] + [Break]
2. Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button which is quite below.
3. Click “New” button below the System Variables panel.
4. In the dialog box, type “devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices” in the Varibale Name field and “1 ” in the Variable Value field.
5. Click OK to exit.
6. Right Click “My Computer” in the desktop and click “Manage” to take you to Computer Management.
7. Select Device Manager in the left menu, and then go to View menu in the top and select “Show Hidden Devices”
8. In the devices tree shown below, expand the various branches in the device tree and look for unused devices or hidden devices which will be indicated by grayed-out or washed out icons.
9. Right-Click the devices and select Uninstall to remove the device driver.
10. Continue this procedure for the entire list of unused drivers.

Source : [Tech-Republic]

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