When you connect a USB device to your Windows PC, it creates some registry entries using which anyone can find out about all of your USB devices that were ever connected to your PC. So if you connected an Android smartphone to your PC three years ago, the entries that were made back then will still be present and can be analyzed to find out the possible device model you were using. With a free tool called Device Cleanup Tool, you can delete multiple or all non-present devices from Windows.
The Device Cleanup Tool runs in two modes restricted mode and elevated mode. The restricted mode is limited in the sense that you cannot remove some of the devices from the computer’s registry. The elevated mode can be launched by right-clicking on the Device Cleanup Tool’s EXE file and choosing Run as Administrator from the right-click context menu. Whether it is running in the restricted mode or elevated mode, can be seen in the title bar of the Device Cleanup Tool’s window.
The program lists all the USB devices that were ever connected to your PC and which are not available for some reason.. In the list, you can see the device along with their device name, class and last used date. If you want to remove any of these non-present devices, you can right-click on any of them and choose Remove Device . Similarly, you can view a little more information about any of these selected devices.
Conclusion: Device Cleanup Tool can show you a list of all the inactive USB devices. You can also remove the left behind entries that have been causing problems very easily. The program is very small in size and does not leave any traces behind in Windows.
You can download Device Cleanup Tool from http://www.uwe-sieber.de/misc_tools_e.html.