Interesting read maybe, and careful what to delete however:
hidden devices -F

Hello Fiddler,

You can also do this by just ensuring you are uninstalling any Drivers for audio devices you no longer use.

Looking at the example on the link you provided, it is an extreme situation. Why anyone would have that many redundant drivers laying around is beyond me.

I highly would not recommend following this option, instead, just ensure you are only installing what is necessary. The risk vs reward just doesn't favor this. You are looking at maybe shaving off a second or two at boot up, at the risk of messing your audio devices up to the point that a reinstall is the only recourse.

Like most things,the best computer maintenance is preventive maintenance. So you should be fully reformatting and reinstalling your operating system every six months to a year. If you are doing that, then there is no need for constantly monitoring redundancies, as you are constantly getting rid of the excess fat that builds up over a long period of time.

Good advice Mikke. I wipe my OS drive out about once a year. Since I make backups of all my data, it's not a real difficult task.

Correct me if I am incorrect (Mac always did), but my understanding is... each time we plug in a USB device (including a BIAB Drive or zip drive) a new set of drivers are created. This can cause conflicts eventually and slow boot-ups.

USBdeview is a handy tool ....

Don, my understanding is that a new driver happens for one device when you plug it into a different USB port. In other words, if you unplug a USB device, you should try to plug it back into the same port each time. Difficult to remember without lots of labels, I know.

That's where USBdeview comes in; you can see which one is active and sweep out the rest. F

Yes, this program is very helpful. I use that, and also my label maker.

Excellent points, Matt.

My Dell computer has 4 USB ports on the front and 4 more on the back which seems to be the design trend of late. I also have a 4-port hub so keeping track of where devices should plug in gets complicated.

Which USB port you have should not matter in the grand scheme of things.

I can unplug my Mouse, which has independent drivers built in, and place it into another port, it will use the same drivers. It won't create a new driver for each Serial Bus it accesses.

If you plug in a new device, windows will automatically try to find the best drivers.

Theoretically, if you plugged in sixteen different Audio interfaces, you might get some issues with redundant drivers. This is outside any practical setup.

Ideally, if you are using that many devices and you are no longer going to use them, just wipe your computer.

As someone who was a peripheral junky, and went through about six different keyboards and mice a year, I can assure you that on a properly maintained computer, you should not run into any issues.

Now, we are also talking about computers, there will always be exceptions and random oddities. Either way, if you find yourself three hours into a command prompt, maybe just cut your losses, backup, and reinstall Windows. It will take way less time and effort.

Only this week I was reading a Windows article on the Device Manager that discussed putting the same device into differing ports actually increasing the number of ports open in the device driver and the benefits of reducing them. In this case USB audio devices. If you show hidden devices in the Device Manager you may indeed find a heap of USB ports not in use. The article suggested deleting those not actually live. Be careful not to delete the ones Windows put there. I’ll see if I can find the article again. I could not find it but it was similar in content to the link Fiddler pointed to.

Another issue with using USB audio interfaces is that often the onboard audio device driver is loaded and on. This can create issues. One can simply disable the onboard sound card.