How to Manage Your USB Devices Better

Most of us probably have a number of USB devices for our PCs. In fact, the USB port has become almost a universal way to attach things. If you are like me, you could use a convenient way to manage and keep track of  all those gadgets and devices. And that is just what a free utility called USBDeview from NirSoft provides. It is a device manager specifically for USB devices and has a number of quite useful functions. 

The utility is stand-alone and can be run from anywhere; it requires no installation. The download file is less than 100 KB and comes in both x32 and x64 versions. For such a small package, there are a surprising number of useful functions. I won’t go into all the details, which are available at thedeveloper’s site, but I will mention several features that I like. You can see some of the features in the graphic of the program's file menu  that is shown above These features are in addition to the very detailed information about USB devices that is provided in the main display. The information that is given includes the device description, its type, whether it's currently connected, whether it's safe to unplug, when it was last plugged in/unplugged and much more.

The developer’s page is quite extensive;  you need to go all the way to the bottom to find the download links.

A few of the features

For reasons known best to Microsoft, the Windows Registry keeps a record of every USB device that has ever been attached to your system even after it is removed. USBDeview will show you this information and anearlier article discussed how to find out which USB devices have been used on your PC . 

Not all USB flash keys have the same speed for writing or reading files and USBDeview provides a simple test using a single large file. A more complete test would use a lot of small files but the utility still provides useful information about the speed of flash memory devices.

There are other ways to do it but the utility gives a quick way to change the drive letter assigned to a USB device.

All in all, this utility provides a great way to manage USB devices. The author says that it is not yet fully compatible with USB 3.0 devices but it recognized my USB 3.0 external drive and listed all its parameters.