One thing all IT admins have worked with at some point in their careers are devices. Whether it be a USB drive, a keyboard, a monitor, all peripheral devices are managed in Windows using Device Manager.

The Windows Device Manager has long been the place to go if you are having trouble with some piece of hardware connected to your computer. You can always rely on those trusty yellow exclamation icons or red X icons to help figure out what’s going on.

Though it’s good enough for most consumers, IT administrators may need more details and options. That’s where Device Remover comes in.

Device Remover is basically an alternative to the Device Manager. You can do everything using it that you can do with the normal device manager, but also a lot more.

windows device manager

As you can see, there is a lot going on with this program. At the top left, you’ll get a list of all your devices, just like the normal Device Manager in Windows. Hover over any item and you get a detailed list of properties. If you click on an item, the same list of properties shows up in the right-hand window.

device properties

If you right-click on a Device, you can quickly perform any action on that device including updating the driver, printing device information, enabling or disabling the device, etc. It basically puts all the commands in one easy to access place.

device manager windows

But that’s just the first tab in Device Remover. If you look at the top, you’ll see there are several more tabs including Device List, Drivers and Services, Memory Loaded Drivers, and System Processes and Handles.

Under Drivers and Services, for example, you can Start, Step or even Delete services from Windows. You can also remove drivers and open registry keys for drivers.

When Device Remover is first started, you might also see a debugging window open with a whole lot of technical stuff that keeps appearing.

device remover

Don’t worry about this, it’s just showing all the steps it goes through when creating the list of devices, etc.

If you go to the Tools menu at the top, you’ll see an option for Application and System. Here you can perform a whole host of other actions such as translating error codes, backing up driver, creating a system restore point, and opening many of the Control Panel applets such as Computer Management, etc.

device manager replacement

Overall, it’s a pretty awesome system utility for Windows that all administrators should carry around with them, especially since it comes as a portable app also. I haven’t gone back to Device Manager since! Enjoy!