Pem’s Tech Blog

I had a strange device driver conflict with my newer GPU (Radeon HD 4850) on Windows 7 and my old motherboard (MSI MS-7184, aka HP AmethystM-GL6E) (see here).  After recently installing the latest ATI GPU drivers, I noticed that the High Definition Audio Controller got re-enabled whenever I reboot Windows 7.  So, I investigated an automated way to disable it after the reboot.

I tried doing it with AutoHotKey, but the GUI scripting wasn’t working for Device Manager.  So instead, I looked into a command line version of Device Manager called devcon.  I had better luck with devcon.  So, I ended up putting a simple one line batch (*.bat) script in my startup folder:

devcon\amd64\devcon.exe disable find *DEV_AA30

How did I figure out the “*DEV_AA30” part?  “devcon.exe find *” listed all the devices, one of which was High Definition Audio Controller with the ID “PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_AA30&SUBSYS_AA301002&REV_00\4&3083E1D6&0&0110”.  Using that ID directly got multiple matches (something weird with the & symbols?).  But I figured out that doing “devcon find *DEV_AA30” only matched one device.

Pem (Admin) :: Apr.10.2011 :: Windows OS :: No Comments »

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