DevManView (64-bit)

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on May 13, 2012

NirSoft's DevManView is a freeware alternative to the built-in Device Manager in Windows. It not only displays your system's devices but also those of any other computers on your network, as long as you have Admin privileges. It's a great choice for managing a home network, letting you keep tabs on each system's hardware and drivers from one interface. DevManView is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions; we downloaded the 64-bit version for Windows 7.

We've tried many of developer Nir Sofer's excellent free apps, including the 32-bit version of DevManView, and we've had very few complaints. The 64-bit version of DevManView gave us no problems, either. It installed and opened cleanly, displaying our system's 120-plus devices in a clean, efficient, and flexible list view, sorted by numerous headings that we could change with the Column Choosing tool. Clicking any heading sorted the list under it, such as by Device Type Code or ID (and many others; more than the Windows tool). Under Advanced Options, we could configure connections to remote computers. Selecting any device in the list let us access its properties, enable or disable it, and otherwise do the things we could do in Device Manager. There's even a Disk Cleanup tool for your stored profile files. Ours used no more than 142KB, so we decided we could live with them for now.

Here's our only complaint, if it can be called that: DevManView's Web site and documentation confusingly describe it as an alternative to the Windows Device Manger, "which displays all devices and their properties in a flat table, instead of a tree view," suggesting that DevManView provides such a tree view. Except it's the other way around: the Windows Device Manager already displays devices in an Explorer-style tree view. DevManView displays devices in a flexible list view. It's hardly critical since the difference between the two views is obvious. DevManView's list view not only works well for many users, but it also organizes data by many more headings than the Windows tool. We recommend it highly to all users of 64-bit Windows (and the 32-bit version to the rest of you)!