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Map and troubleshoot your USB ports with Microsoft USB View

This can be handy tool when your USB devices are giving you trouble. Do you have other tools and utilities that you use for your troubleshooting that your peers may not know about?

This is an issue that has annoyed me intensely over the years. Perhaps I have been fortunate only having a few usb peripherals or been able to ignore it, but this should really be an inbuilt utility of all windows versions,

It would have been really nice if the author had provided a LINK directly to the software. All I could find was usbview.zip that doesn't say that it's good for Vista/Windows 7.

http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Utilities/usbview.zip

And the article is clear that this XP utility works fine with Win7.

OK. I looked for and found the file. It is not compatible with Win 7, 64 bit for AMD CPUs. I looks good, so I wish someone would recompile it with a Win 7, 64 bit compatible compiler, since apparently the source code is available.

I tried the nirsoft product mentioned in another respondent's post. It has a Win 7 64 bit version and works rather nicely

...which I ran the USB View utility was running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (AMD 64-bit Dual Core Processor 4800+). It runs fine on this system.

What version of Windows 7 do you have? What error message did you receive?

Like liljim, I cannot get usb view to run on my Win7 64 (Intel). I have it placed on a memory stick and attempted to run it form there. It appears to do something (hourglass) then stops - don't even get an icon on the task bar.
Tried it on XP and it runs perfectly. Tried running it in administrator mode still wouldn't run. How did others get it to work?

Just because you knew about this tool years ago doesn't mean that everyone does. Personally I haven???t ever troubleshot a USB connectivity issue that didn't involve the port being broken and frying devices (which you don't need a utility to find and troubleshoot). Assuming people know stuff just because you do is a very egotistical thing to do.
Bill

Good article and good info!

I have been using Nirsoft's Free USB View utility. Helpful tool... worth checking out:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html

My organisation does not allow use of USB based storage devices. But then we also know that this is virtually impossible to enforce. So,its there any utility to detect the history of USB connected devices & then to securely delete it?

Go to the Nirsoft website Force mentioned above. They have a utility called USB Deview. Works great - we have used it for years. We have a script running that calls the utility every time a machine logs in and puts a copy of the log in a folder on a file server where we can review them. If you have a domain you can also use Group Policies to disable users adding USB devices to their machines. Only so much you can do though; people still have DVDs, the Internet, access to networks, etc,

I see no current posts?

Trying to figure out the utility, does "bcdUSB: 0x0110" means the device is USB 1.1? as all but one are 0x0200.
As well, does "Root Hub: USB#ROOT_HUB20#4&ff4fef2&0#{f18a0e88-c30c-11d0-8815-00a0c906bed8}" means the hub is USB 2.0?

...USB 1 or USB 2 you need to see where the device appears in USB View's tree display

As I mentioned in the article there are two main USB connections set up in Windows 7 in my example system: Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller & Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller

The Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller represents USB 1.0 and anything that appears under that heading in USB View's tree display is a USB 1.0 device.

The Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller represents USB 2.0 and anything that appears under that heading in USB View's tree display is a USB 2.0 device.

but some of this functionality has been in Device Manager since Window98. Simlpy Click View, then Devices by Connection. Not a 1 step USB troubleshooting utility like this tool, but the option is there.

Never heard of FTDI? obviously never had to use a RS232 to USB adapter.

Greg was rightly cautious about having to download a MS module from a 3rd-party site. Why would MS provide the source code but not the executable? Judging from the fact that the module needs to identify the type and manufacture of each USB device detected to be useful, my guess is that MS decided that the volatility of the USB market makes it prohibitively expensive to maintain. Whatever, it remains untested for Windows 7 which means that, at best, the information it provides could prove unreliable (curiously, on my first test run, it reported detection of a "USB Mass Storage Device" that does not exist). Of course, it could also harbor some flaw or vulnerability that MS cannot be held responsible for.

Finally got it to compile and run. The downloaded executable would not run in Windows 7 but did work well on my XP machine. After installing VS11 Beta and the WDK8 Preview the source would not compile until I did a large amount of re-configuring of the compile and project settings.

The utility is a handy novelty and does find all of my USB devices but the really valuable lessons learned here is the problems of developing for Windows 8 and using VS11. There is a large amount of missing and incorrect information and many basic mistakes made by Microsoft and I am not impressed at all. If they want me to devote effort to building Mosaic applications they are going to have to provide better development support than the other tablet OS platforms.

Strange, considering that Greg's "Takeaway" asserted that this module is Windows 7 compatible. I had no problem running it under Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit.
Questions:
1) Which version of Windows 7 did you try this with?
2) From what link did you download your executable (the article gave you http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Utilities/usbview.zip)?
3) What kind of response did you get?

WSCC contains a much better tool by Nirsoft.
It allows for enable or removing a device.

www.nirsoft.net has a similar but complementary utility, USDDeview. Between USBDeview, USBView, and the Dev Mgr, I can mostly figure out which USB ports are what, and what they ports are doing. Two cautions: (1) none of them will tell you precisely which port is "really" USB v 2.0 or 1.0. (2) the Hub numbers jump around depending on the order in which you plug in a device to a port; but the port numbers do stay fixed. (Thus, Hub 1 Port 2 may become Hub 3 Port 2 when you plug something into Hub 0.)

I have been using a couple of utilities for managing USB connections for a while.

Unfortunately these are not free but they have lifetime licenses.

USB Safely Remove
http://safelyremove.com/

Zentimo
http://zentimo.com/

I am afraid I shuddered as soon as you mentioned - type xxxx in the Bing box !

Bing box ... what is wrong with saying search engine ?

I can see were this will be very useful in diagnosing and troubleshooting, Thank you for finding and sharing this Utility.

While I don't envision a need for it, I'll check it out and add it to my software toolbox. Future Tech seems to be heavy into hardware level communications (judging by their utilities), so it is no wonder they updated it for Windows 7 (and Linux?). It was nice of them to share.

Can you?

On two Win 7 Ultimate x64 laptops it gives the APPCRASH error message in whatever mode I try to get it to run but on a Win 7 Home x64 netbook and an XP Pro/SP3 laptop it works as advertised. The 2 Win 7 Ux64 laptops are first and second generation i7 (M620 & 2820QM) and the netbook is a Celeron 743. Nirsoft's tool works fine on all four machnes.

I tried to save this as I thought it very good. I have recently had problems with USB ports in a USB hub not working. I got a horrible black on dark green thing to save.

Check this one: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html
and you don't need to worry about the source...
It gives you also all installed drivers (that are not currently connected) and much more.
Recommended. also his other tools.

Alon

Great article : Very helpful to have the reminder for the times we are under pressure to solve an issue, and forget to turn to a useful tool that will give some information to move forward quickly.
I found the Nirsoft site from a previous article on this site for Shellview apps. I use the usbdeviewX64 on my Win 7 machine, works great.

Hi, I tried USBview. It did not work in Windows 7 in any mode [compatibility , Administrator etc]. I tried UVCView downloaded from ftp://ftp.efo.ru/pub/ftdichip/Utilities/UVCView.x86.exe
It worked fine giving the info outlined above by Greg.

OK I just tried this utility on a new XP system and get the old " this application has encountered a problem and must close"

Based upon Microsoft's USBview souce code I have made an advanced remake - the USB Device Tree Viewer:
Info:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtreeview_e.html
Download:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/usbtreeview.zip

Main improvements:
- shows drive letters and COM ports
- seamless refresh
- safe removal, device restart, port reset