Device Manager

Screenshot of the Device Manager tool under Windows Vista.

Screenshot of the Device Manager tool under Windows Server 2003 showing hardware components organized under categories.

The Device Manager is a Control Panel applet in Microsoft Windows operating systems. It allows users to view and control the hardware attached to the computer. When a piece of hardware is not working, the offending hardware is highlighted for the user to deal with. The list of hardware can be sorted by various criteria.

For each device, users can:

• Supply device drivers for the hardware
• Enable or disable devices
• Tell Windows to ignore malfunctioning devices
• View other technical properties

Device Manager was introduced with Windows 95 and later added to Windows 2000. In NT-based versions, it is included as a Microsoft Management Console snap-in.

See also

• List of Microsoft Windows components
• Microsoft Management Console

External links

• Displaying detailed information in Windows XP device manager
• Displaying unconnected devices in Windows XP device manager
• The DevCon utility