Windows 7: Device Manager - Add or Remove from "My Computer" Context Menu

Another handy one Shawn

Thanks

Hey man thank you very much!!!! ))) I just posted today this question and there you do the answer on my Facebook wall
Thanks Brink

You're most welcome guys.

Doesn't seem to work on Windows 7 64 bit, while the last line in the .reg file does work to open the device manager, for some reason the context menu entry doesn't show up when I right click on the 'Computer' icon on my desktop. I have the 'Manage' entry in my right click context menu and it works as expected, however this Device Manager tweak doesn't seem to work for me for some reason. I opened the relevant key in regedit and noticed several distinct differences in the information contained in the keys, I wonder if some of those differences might not be to blame for why it won't work for me. For example for the 'Manage' context menu entry there is a String Value named 'MUIVerb' with the following information in it "@%systemroot%\system32\mycomput.dll,-400", the 'Default' entry also contains the same information. Could this difference be the problem?

Additionally if I recreate the MUIVerb entry in the key for the Device Manager entry and copy the data to the 'default' entry it shows up in my context menu now as a 2nd 'Manage' entry, however it also messes up the icon settings for my hard drives when I open Windows Explorer. If I strip away the ',-400' it then shows up in the context menu as 'Device Manager' as it should (and even works properly, as did the 2nd 'Manage' entry mentioned above). However I'm left with the same icon problem as before, the icons show up looking like a sheet of paper with the corner folded over and an image in the center that looks kind of like the right hand pane of windows explorer in 'Icon' view mode. Any idea what I'm missing here?

Hello Bartman,

The differences with "Manage" make no difference. "Device Manager" works on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 as is.

Are you saying that it added "Device Manager" to your context menu, but doesn't do anything when you click on it?

How about from the other locations?

Are you logged in as an administrator?

Bartman,

Give this .reg file below a try to see how it works for you. It's the same except using an "Expandable String Value" instead of "String Value" entries. It'll remove the old entry, and replace it with this one for expandable.

Thank you for taking the time to reply, let me clarify things a little.

When I first tried the .reg file from the main article on this thread it didn't add anything to my 'Computer' right click context menu, not a single new entry.

Then I tried playing around with the registry entries I mentioned and by copying the 2 values from the pre-existing 'Manage' context menu entry (the one that has the blue and yellow UAC style shield icon next to it). I was first able to get a second 'Manage' entry to appear in my 'Computer' context menu, this one had the icon depicted showing the little toolbox in front of a computer though, when I clicked this new 'Manage' entry it opened the Device Manager. The other one opened a window with a title of 'Computer Management'.

I was hoping it could get it to actually show as 'Device Manager' in my 'Computer' right click context menu so I tried removing the ",-400" from the copied values. This time after restarting it successfully showed up as 'Device Manager' and even had the correct icon still too. And this new 'Device Manager' entry functioned as the original .reg file was supposed to (even though it didn't for me until I started playing around with regestry entries within the key that they .reg file creates only, no other keys were modified by me).

Unfortunately around this time I noticed that my Hard Drive icons were 'missing' when I opened 'Computer'. The image below is clipped from a screen shot and depicts the drives listed in 'Computer', as you can see the icons for drive C:/D:/K: are missing their 'normal' icons.


The new test file you shared worked right off the bat to add the 'Device Manager' entry but even though I had deleted the changes I had made in the registry before using it I still have messed up drive icons.

I did uninstall one piece of software around the time this was giving me problems and I wonder if maybe that might be partly to blame for the problem now that I think of it (Trial version of Hard Drive Sentinel, I was hoping it would display S.M.A.R.T. data for an external drive I have that I think is on the brink of failing since it makes some odd noises occasionally). But I used a pretty popular removal tool that I've had excellent results with in the past to clean up any leftovers from it (IObit Uninstaller, many reviews rate it even higher than Revo Uninstaller, and it's a much cleaner and easier to use program too).

I tried rebuilding the icon cache too hoping it would restore the default hard drive icons on reboot. It's a little odd I think that it only seems to be hard drives that are affected, not flash drives, or cd/dvd drives (which is what is really making me lean towards Hard Drive Sentinel as the cause now).