I have a specific piece of hardware which I'd like to disable and re-enable each time my Windows restarts. I created a batch script which is supposed to do that, along with running my program afterwards:
cd %~dp0
devcon.exe disable "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_687F"
timeout /t 3
devcon.exe enable "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_687F"
runMyWindows.exe --totally-not-virus
I am not sure if devcon.exe
is a proper application for this in the first place because I have no experience with writing Windows scripts at all.
However, I have noticed that those commands don't quite do the job because my runMyWindows.exe
program doesn't work as it should until I go to Windows Device Manager and manually disable and re-enable this device.
I have only 1 user on this machine which is in "Administrator" group and I am not running this script in any special way except double-clicking the .bat
file, or in case of the restart, it is run from the startup folder (C:\Users\oxxo\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
).
Is there a way to do this properly within my batch script which should be run automatically on Windows startup?
Most people who'll be reading this thread won't find the other answer very useful, because it's mostly about how to run the script in the question with administrator privileges. I'll attempt to answer the implicit questions here:
I found it easiest to use devcon.exe (6mb), like in the question:
set HARDWARE_ID="PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229&SUBSYS_11018086&REV_61"
devcon disable %HARDWARE_ID%
timeout /t 3
devcon enable %HARDWARE_ID%
devcon.exe
requires administrator privileges.
devcon
?It's part of the Windows driver development toolkit. Unfortunately, the official resources ask you to download a 1gb SDK. I was able to get around that by following one of the answers here: https://superuser.com/questions/1002950/quick-method-to-install-devcon-exe
Once you have it, make sure devcon.exe
is on your %PATH%
. I put mine in C:\Windows\System32\
.
Open a Command Prompt with administrator privileges and do devcon hwids *
, which will print all the devices and their corresponding IDs. That will produce a lot of output. Use Command Prompts search function to find what you need. Here's the section I was interested in:
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229&SUBSYS_11018086&REV_61\4&6AB551C&0&00E1
Name: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN
Hardware IDs:
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229&SUBSYS_11018086&REV_61
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229&SUBSYS_11018086
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229&CC_028000
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229&CC_0280
Compatible IDs:
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229&REV_61
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229
PCI\VEN_8086&CC_028000
PCI\VEN_8086&CC_0280
PCI\VEN_8086
PCI\CC_028000
PCI\CC_0280
Pick a specific enough ID and check if it works by doing:
devcon find "PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4229&SUBSYS_11018086&REV_61"
If that finds only 1 device, and it's the one you want, you're good. Notice that often you'll want to escape the hardware ID with quotes.
In my case, I also needed to run this script when computer has booted after shutdown or sleep. I gave the above script sensible permissions and used Task Scheduler to run it on login and on startup, in its terminology: https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/67503-task-create-run-program-startup-log.html?ltr=T