Durham Personal Computer Users' Club - Featured Software July 2024

July 2024
Featured Software

Submitted
August 13, 2024
by Dan Delong

1. USB Deview and 2. USB TreeView

[USB means Universal Serial Bus, and has it ever evolved... from a way to connect a mouse, joy stick, scanner, or printer, to just about everything else. It is now used also for internal connections on the main board, for keyboard, glide pad, web cam, and of course, thumb drives. Smart phones have universally adapted the USB-C protocol to all makes of such phones, for both charging and data transfers.]

1. USB Deview

About a decade ago, during a club meeting at the church, a free program was demonstrated that could reveal information about every USB device ever plugged into your computer. It would name the device and show individual serial numbers for each, along with date and time used.

More importantly, it also allowing the removal of such records.

It came as a shock, that such detailed USB records even existed. That program was called, USB Deview, written and maintained by a single developer, at NirSoft, and now in version 3.07, for 2023.

A right click on a USB Device brings up a long list of options, three of which involve disabling, uninstalling, and removing the device.

It works on all Windows systems later than ME/98, whether 32-bit or 64-bit, along with some caveats for a couple of OS versions. The notes (accompanying the above link) are highly explanatory. (Remote computers can also be read by USB Deview.)

USB TreeView

The zip download is 101 KB, installed it is 205 KB

However, the link also contains a lot of misdirecting ad distractions, so scroll down and look for this information, supplied by the author of USBDeview.

If you have any problem, suggestion, comment, or you found a bug in my utility, you can send a message to nirsofer@yahoo.com

Download USBDeview

Download USBDeview for x64 systems

Check Download MD5/SHA1/SHA256 Hashes

2. USB TreeView

USB TreeView is freely distributed by German developer, Uwe Sieber, and it provides extraordinary information about USB Root Hubs and Ports, including Thunderbolt. For those members who deal with the hardware 'innards' of computers, USB TreeView offers essential information.

USB TreeView

In the words of the developer...

USBTreeView started with the USBView source code from the DDK (Windows Driver Development Kit) for Server 2003.
Here are the improvements I've done:

Window position is saved, yea

Informations from the Windows Device Management are collected and matched with the found USB devices; Therefore UsbTreeView can show the child devices, including drive letters and COM-ports

Background color and font of the right pane can be set (the font shown in the screenshots is DOSLike 7)

Keeps the tree item selection over refresh

Shows open handles on failed safe removal

Way more descriptors are decoded, as Audio 2.0

Hexdump of the descriptors can be shown

Safe removal, device restart and port restart

Extended USB information available under Windows 8, 10 and 11 (taken from the latest USBView sample application)

Extended information about host controllers

Failed USB requests are re-tried in the background, e.g. if a USB mouse was moved while requesting its properties

Toolbar with jump-lists for easily finding devices in complex trees

Tree-view with handmade 16x16 icons, USBView used 32x32 icons scaled down to 15x15

many minor improvements

USB TreeView

Installing the program will result in warnings from Microsoft, which are easily surmounted.