If you've ever tried to troubleshoot a USB
device on a Windows PC, you probably had to take a look at the Device Manager and know
that it's a complete nightmare just figuring out which devices are which, because the names
are so generic, literally. It says "Generic USB Hub" or "USB Composite Device", you have no idea
what anything is. But by the end of the video, you can have it looking like this,
with everything nicely named correctly. Plus I'll show you some free tools that you
can basically use instead of Device Manager, at least for USB devices, because they show you
more info, are laid out better, and are more useful in general. And along the way, I'll explain
some things I learned while making this video that you probably have always been wondering,
like what the heck is a USB Composite Device anyway? And by the way, if you wanna skip ahead
directly to the part where I literally just show you what registry thing to change to set the name,
I'll put that link right here, the timestamp, but I do recommend watching the rest of it.
There's a whole bunch of useful info that you might not have realized you wanted to know. Here's
a quick overview of what I'll explain exactly. I'm gonna go over the two step
process for renaming devices. First of all, you have to figure out which
device is which, which is actually the harder part. And then actually renaming each
device, which is pretty easy. I'm also gonna mention three different free tools that
will make both of those steps way easier. The first is USBDeview, second is USBLogView,
and the third is USB Device Tree Viewer. I'll explain these later. And I'll put the links
to the download page for all these in the description. And finally, real quick, I
want to mention that some people online have mentioned that after they changed the
device names, it doesn't stick after a restart, and it goes back. That wasn't an issue with me, it
did stay, but you might want to just try renaming the device and then restarting and making sure
it stays before going and doing them all and then realizing, on your computer for whatever reason,
they didn't. It would be really annoying. Oh, and if you enjoy this video, please for
the love of God, give it a thumbs up. The algorithm is probably
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find it useful, if you give it a thumbs up, that'll at least tell the algorithm that it's
a good video. Alright so let's get into it. The first main tool that I'm
gonna talk about is USBDeview, this is a Nirsoft tool. And basically
it kind of replaces the Device Manager, at least for USB devices. The Device Manager
shows other types of devices, not just USB, but we're worrying about USB right now, so this is a
great tool. You can choose which columns to show, and this basically shows you all the same info
that you could get through the Device Manager, but in Device Manager, you have to
like right, click it, go to properties, look through each individual tab,
it's obnoxious. Whereas with this, it literally just shows you all at once, it's
so much easier. Now here's a couple columns you probably want to make sure that
they are enabled. First of all, is the Description column. And this is
basically what the device name is going to show up as in Device Manager. So here you'll
see a bunch of 'em called like "USB Input Device", "USB Composite Device", and you probably
recognize those as the ones that show in Device Manager. Not really helpful. Yes, some
device descriptions actually do say what the thing is, but not many. You'll also want to enable
the Device Name column, which ironically no, is not the one that shows up in Device
Manager. And also you want to enable the Friendly Name column. This is actually what
can override the name in Device Manager. If there is a Friendly Name set in the registry
for that device, then Device Manager will actually use that. You can see at this point, I already
named all my devices, so yours won't look like this, it'll just be empty. But for mine, this
is basically what it'll look like for you at the end. Some other columns you'll probably want
to enable are Vendor Name and Product Name. These might be empty right now, don't
worry about that. And also Vendor ID and Product ID. And finally, you can enable
the Instance ID column. Don't worry if you don't know what the heck this means, you
don't have to know that. It's basically just gonna be if you want to search
the ID that you see somewhere else, you'll be able to find it in this column,
but you don't have to know what it means. Okay, so before worrying about how
to figure out which device is which, let's just assume you already see a few that
you know exactly what they are. And so now I'll show you how to set that Friendly Name in the
registry, which will change the name it appears as in Device Manager. First thing you wanna
do is in USBDeview at the top, go to Options. And then where it says "RegEdit Open Mode"
do "With Escalation" because you need to have the registry editor open as admin for it to
work. And now literally all you have to do is, on any device that you want to
rename, you simply right click, hit "Open in RegEdit", and this will
open the registry editor to that key. First real quick, you're gonna wanna
back up the registry just in case, you always wanna do this when doing anything with
the registry. To do that, you go to File, Export. Under where it says "Export Range", select All,
and then just save it to the desktop somewhere. It'll take a minute to do this. Okay, now what
you wanna do is create a Friendly Name value. So you wanna right click and hit New >
"String Value". And then you wanna set the name to "FriendlyName", no spaces, with a capital
F and a capital N. If there's already a value named FriendlyName, you can obviously skip that.
After the key is there, just [Double Left Click], which will let you change the value
of it, and name it whatever you want. So for example, I can name this " Logitech G502
Mouse". Once you do that, you can hit Okay, and then close out the registry editor. It
should already be changed. And now if you go to Device Manager, you can hit "Scan
For Hardware Changes" or in USBDeview you can hit the refresh button, and it should
actually show that name now, that you put in. Alright so now that you know how
to actually go and set the names, let's go over the probably harder part, which
is figuring out which devices are which. Like I said, some of the device names may
already tell you right off the bat, and even some of the descriptions may
say it. But for most of them that's not the case. But here's something that will
make our life way easier for most devices. So remember how in the Vendor Name and Product
Name column, those are basically all empty, that's because there is no key, basically, to
correspond the IDs to the actual names. However, there is someone who created such a list.
So notice at the bottom of USBDeview, it says "usb.ids" not loaded.
Just left, click on that, and it will take you to a text document
that has such a list. And this is created by a guy Stephen Gowdy go on his website,
linux-usb.org. Don't worry that it says Linux, it works here too. So just right click
this page and hit "Save As". By default, it's gonna try and save as a text file, so
usb.ids.txt, just take off that .txt extension. It has to literally be called "usb.ids"
and you wanna put that in the same folder as the USBDeview program. Then you could just
close out of USBDeview, open it back up again, and it should say that it is now loaded. And now
you should see that for a lot of devices, if not most, the Vendor Name and Product Name should be
there, and this should definitely help you out for identifying which things are which.
Or even if you don't recognize the vendor name or product name, a lot of
devices have multiple entries, even though it's one thing. So a lot of times
this will make it at least easier to see, "Okay, this has the same vendor name. This might actually
be the same device with three different entries." Alright so that first half
of the video, theoretically, you should know what you need to do to
rename the devices. And if you want to go and figure out how to do it all yourself, be
my guest, but this next half of the video is gonna be a bunch of different tips for how
I figured out, how to do this way easier. So definitely you'll want to stick around for
this. And that'll include the other tools that I mentioned before. First, a few things
you'll want to understand that will make your life way easier. First is understanding
what exactly a "USB Composite Device" is, because you are gonna see a bunch
of these in the device list. And a USB composite device is basically
just a single device that has multiple "things" in it. Take for example a webcam.
A webcam has multiple components inside, there's the image sensor to create
the video signal, and the microphone to create the audio signal. And instead
of only being able to connect to those two different types of devices separately,
they are combined into a composite device. So in other words, instead of separately,
the video sensor telling the computer, "Hi, I'm a video device" and the microphone
saying, "Hi, I'm an audio device." The webcam combines itself into one thing and
tells the computer, "Hi, I'm a webcam and I can do video and audio." And since it can
do multiple things, it's a composite device, that's what composite means. Now that being
said, it's important to know that you still will see each separate component show up in Device
Manager. So here you can see under audio devices, there is the one for the microphone, under
cameras there is the one for the video. But it's just that there's also under
the USB devices, the composite device. So that's why you're probably gonna see a
lot of devices that have multiple entries, but they're really for one thing.
You're gonna have the composite device, which is like the combination of them, and
then you'll also see separate entries for each individual component. So don't be surprised
by that. Another thing you'll want to understand, is if you see the term USB "Hub", that doesn't
necessarily mean it's gonna be a USB hub that sits on your desk externally, it could be an internal
hub, like the ones on the back of your computer. Those are still connected to a hub,
it's just like an internal hub, and it's connected directly to the
motherboard. And there may also be one for like the front of your computer,
or it may actually be an external one you do have sitting on your desk. So just be aware
of that. So for example, for a bunch of these, I figured out that they were internal hubs, so
I literally just renamed it Motherboard Hub. Alright now another thing to understand
about USB hubs is that each USB 3.0 hub, internally, it's gonna show up under
a different virtual hub, depending on whether it's a USB 3.0 or 2.0 device. I'm
gonna go to the computer to explain this, because trying to explain it without
showing you is just gonna be too difficult. So let me explain that over there real
quick. Alright so here we are in a tool I'm gonna mention later, and this isn't
important, just focus on this left side. This basically shows you a tree of all the
hubs on the computer, and all the devices and ports for each hub. And there's something
I wanna show you with how USB 3 hubs work. So I actually labeled these already. So notice
this one says "StarTech USB 3.2 Hub - 3.2 Interface", and down here it says "StarTech USB
3.2 Hub 2.0 Interface". And for each of these, they have four ports. Now this physical hub on
my desk actually only has four ports, so why are there eight of them? Basically there is gonna show
a separate hub device in your list of devices, one of which is for the 3.0 and one is for the 2.0
for the same hub. And actually this program has a nifty tool where if you click one, on one of the
hubs, like the 3.2 version, it actually highlights the corresponding companion port for the 2.0 and
vice versa. So when I click on Port 4 in the 2.0 interface, it'll actually highlight the Port 4
up in the 3.2 to show that it's the same one. And notice how these two are both USB 2.0
devices. This one appears the USB 3.0 device. And depending on what type of device, it's
gonna go into its corresponding hub. So I just wanna show you that if you do have a USB 3
hub, you're gonna see two basically cloned ports, it's gonna seem like, but really one
is for USB 2.0, and one is for 3.0 . And finally another tip. If you're
not really sure what a device is, but you know it's associated with a
certain device under a multi device thing, like this Thunderbolt 4 dock I have. There's a
few devices I don't know what the heck they are, like this Billboard device,
WinUSB, not sure what those are. So I literally just named them
"Thunderbolt 4 dock - WinUSB" and Thunderbolt4 Dock - Billboard Device".
So even though I don't know what those are, at least I'll know in the future that
they're associated with that dock. Alright, finally let me go over those two more tools
that I mentioned. First is USBLogView, I've talked about this in previous
videos. It is also a Nirsoft tool, and basically it just shows you what devices
are being plugged in and unplugged as a log. So if you already know what device you're
looking for, like say a thumb drive, but you can't find it in the list of
devices, what you can literally do is have USBLogView running, plug it in
or unplug it. And it will literally show you like all the info for that
device. And then you could just find it correspondingly in the USBDeview or
the Device Manager. And it also makes it way easier to see if there are multiple
device listings for one individual device. For example, when I plug
in my Yubikey or unplug it, you can see there's a whole bunch of things
associated with this, even though it's one physical USB device. Alright now this next
tool is quickly becoming one of my favorites, it's USB Device, Tree Viewer. And I actually
just found out about this while making this video. This won't just show you which
devices are plugged into the computer, it actually shows you the structure of
which hubs those devices are plugged into, like which port on that hub, and even if you
have chains of hubs, which hub another hub is plugged into. And also, like I mentioned
before, if it's a USB 3 hub, if you click on a port for that hub, it will actually show you
the corresponding USB 2.0 port and vice versa. So you can know that it is the same port,
it's just under the different virtual USB 2.0 hub. And this is useful because a lot
of times those are not next to each other, even though you think they should be, they're the
same port, but they could be way down the list. Another neat thing is if there is a device
that has multiple devices combined into it, it'll actually just show as one thing on here,
but it'll show like a 2x or 3x next to it. So for example, with this Logitech G502 mouse, at the end it says 2x HID and that way I can
know that, "Okay there's actually two devices, but it's just for one physical thing." Also
in this program, just like with USBDeview, you can go directly into the registry editor
to add the Friendly Name. You simply right click the device, and do open in Regedit, and
then select the entry. You might first have to go to file, Run As Administrator, but then it
will work. And if a device is multiple combined, like this one that does say 2x HID, then when
you hover over open in Regedit, there will be multiple entries. So you can just go through
all of them, and add a friendly name for each. Just be aware though, that sometimes it'll show
a "Usbflags" shorter entry thing. Don't worry about that, I don't know what that is, that's not
gonna be what you wanna go to. Another thing that might make it helpful for identifying devices,
if you go to the Options, go to where it says "Device Names in Tree", and then you have a
few options for what it will actually show. So you could say show the name from Device
Manager or from String Descriptors or Smart Choice. I found Smart Choice usually does a
pretty good job. Also, another cool feature, is if you do plug in the device or unplug it,
it will show that port as being red or green, so it'll show you exactly where
that thing got plugged in. Alright now one really tricky thing
you might notice, is if you click even accidentally on a device twice, it will
highlight the name and show it as if you can do a text entry and rename it right there.
However, that does not actually rename the device so it'll show in Device Manager, for
example. What changing it like this does, is actually changes a registry entry called
"CustomName", and this doesn't seem to change the name anywhere else, except in USB
Device Tree Viewer. And the tricky thing is, if you do change it like that, then USB Device
Tree Viewer will only show that name. Even if you do go and set a Friendly Name for it, even
if you change the name type in the options, it will only show what you typed
in there, which is really annoying. And another thing to understand, is
if you accidentally double click and open up that text entry thing,
then even if you click away, that will register as you set that name.
So now that name will stick permanently, if that makes sense, in this program at least.
So if you happen to accidentally double click on an entry and then click away, and then
you're seeing that this name won't change ever again, that's why. Alright now this final
tip will be useful if you're looking in Device Manager and you see something that's
not named, and you really can't find it in USBDeview or anywhere else .Basically
right click it and go to device properties. And then under the Details tab, look for
where it says "Device Instance Path." You could just right click to copy that, and
then go back into the USBDeview program. And then you can search for that, and then
you'll be able to find that device, this will actually show under "Instance ID",
that's what it's called in USBDeview. And that will take you, theoretically, to
that device exactly. Or alternatively, if you find the device in the USB Tree View
Program and you can't find it in USBDeview, then look for on the right hand side where it
says "Device ID", that's the same thing here, just copy that, search that in USBDeview
and that'll also be under the instance ID column. So basically Device
Instance Path, Device ID, and Instance ID are all the same thing. So I
know this video probably got really technical, but if you are someone who was looking for
this information, hopefully it was very useful, and it went over some other stuff that you
might not have expected you needed to know. So again, if you did like it, please give
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enable all notifications. Otherwise the YouTube algorithm might not show you videos, even if
you do subscribe. If you wanna keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is where I was
talking about other Nirsoft programs that are all free tools that might be really
useful, that you might wanna check out. So I'll put that link right there.
So thanks so much for watching guys, and I'll see you in the next video.
