Batch Uninstall Devices in PowerShell

Introduction

Recently while troubleshooting Windows devices, I found several hundred copies of some multimedia devices installed on a few of my systems. I wanted to get rid of all these duplicates but the GUI only allows a single device to be uninstalled at a time. Doing this manually would have been a very time-consuming process. After scouring the internet for a way to remove them all at once and only repeatedly seeing "It can't be done" (or other unhelpful advice), I came up with this solution in Powershell that works nicely.

I thought I'd post it here to help anyone else trying to remove a lot of devices, but was unable to find a solution for it. This works in Windows 10 and presumably 7 and 8, although I haven't tried it on those platforms.

Using the Code

The script can be executed in a single command, but for clarity, I broke it up into a few script lines. It doesn't have to be run as a .PS1 script, but it does only seem to work in the PowerShell ISE.

To uninstall all devices with a given name, use the following script:

$deviceName="Name of the device(s) you want to remove"
foreach ($dev in (Get-PnpDevice | Where-Object{$_.Name -eq $deviceName})) {
  &"pnputil" /remove-device $dev.InstanceId 
}

Or as a single command:

foreach ($dev in (Get-PnpDevice | Where-Object{$_.Name -eq "Name of device to remove")) 
{ &"pnputil" /remove-device $dev.InstanceId }

And that's it!

Points of Interest

There are other ways to enumerate and filter the devices (such as Get-WmiObject), but this was the only way I found that also works with hidden devices.

History

• 16^th September, 2021: Initial version