Renaming a device?

[Eiji]

I uninstalled a driver for my network card and when I reinstalled it, the device name looks like this under Device Manager:

I don't quite understand why the device name is appended with a #3 instead of looking like this which is how it was before:

How can I fix this?

Thanks!

 

[Snowknight26]

Open regedit
Search for the name of the device
Modify the Values's Data field to reflect the name you want
Rinse, repeat

Caution: Modifying the registry may leave your system non-functional, so use at your own risk.

 

[American Zombie]

Look in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\PCI
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Enum\PCI
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\PCI

 

[Eiji]

I tried editing the name at those locations American Zombie but I get this error:

 

[fitz]

Honestly, I wouldn't bother renaming it. It doesn't really hurt anything and you probably won't really care either way.

It's named "#3" because you have some old devices or your old driver (if you reinstalled the driver, i'm assuming there was a reason..). If you searched through that key, you probably have some other devices with the name you are trying to set this one to.

you could delete the registry items and let windows redetect all your devices but, again, I wouldn't recommend this

You can drop to a command prompt, and run the following commands from the command prompt:

set dev_mgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
devmgmt.msc

This will open up device manager. In device manager, go to the view menu and select the option to "show hidden devices"
In your network adapters section, there should be some "grey" items that were installed at one point but are no longer "present" or connected. You can delete them from here a little safer than registry hacking.

 

[Eiji]

Thanks Fitz, I'll give that a try but will backup my registry first or create a system restore beforehand.

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I just tried it and there were no grey items in device manager. Very strange.