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How can I make "phantom" device drivers appear in the Device Manager? (Like NICs that were removed)

To show "hidden" or "phantom" devices, like network cards, audio or video hardware that were removed, you just need to add an Environment var to the SYSTEM Environment:

devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

This is really relevant to those times you switched a network card, and the new one is given the old one's IP address. This is very confusing to Windows (even though it shouldn't be, right?) so it would be nice to be able to remove the old card from the computer's configuration.

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