Windows 95/98 forum: Uninstalling conflicting devices Win 98

Was to install the machine's drivers in the order mandated by the machine's maker.

But there were millions of machines with conflicts in device manager that ran just fine and never corrected. Partly because it worked and mostly because having a clean device manager is a bit of work.

This is not an offer to fix your device manager screen. But to tell what usually fixes it so you can do that.
Bob

I don't look at the registry. I don't look at Device Manager.

Does the machine work?
Bob

You MUST have to hand all of the software installation disks that came with each hardware device, because you need to reinstall some (or perhaps all) of the peripheral devices! (e.g. the monitor, the printer, the scanner, the sound card (or chip), the USB ports, pen drives, digital camera, etc.)

You can't see all the entries that are stored in Device Manager while the machine is running in normal mode.

You have to reboot into SAFE mode (press F5 or F8 on restarting the computer), and then open Device Manager. Delete all "ghost" entries (those entries/devices which only show up in Safe Mode), as they cause a conflict with other installed device drivers. Then reboot normally.

So called "ghost" entries are entries for devices that are not currently attached to the computer. They may not even exist any more (e.g. for old printers you've thrown out, or for old devices that have broken, typically USB pen drives).

Sometimes a deletion of ONLY the "ghost" entries is not effective. In that case the solution is to delete ALL devices, *including* the "ghost" entries, from Device Manager, while in Safe Mode; and then reboot normally. That effects a massive clear-out of faulty and conflicting drivers.

While the computer is switched off, unplug all devices that (a) you no longer need for this computer, or that (b) you don't have the correct driver files for.

On the reboot, Windows wil ask you to insert the disk(s) containing the device driver files for each hardware device you deleted (but only for those devices that are then actually still attached to the computer).