Hey guys
Know this an old thread but couldn't help chipping in with an answer..
)
It's pretty simple to change any device name in your device manager to whatever you want!
It can be done by modifying the .inf file used by the device you are renaming.
Modifying the .inf file will automatically modify the registry values the device reads from.
Here’s how
You will need to know what driver your device is using so open device manager, go to the properties of the device you are modifying, select the details tab and scroll to "inf name" and select it.
This will give you the name of the .inf file you are looking for so now ya gotta go find it.
The easiest way is to find it is to unhide hidden system folders and do a plain old search otherwise it should be in c:\windows\inf
After you find it and open it you will need to do a search within notepad for the name the device is currently called
This should bring you to the line you need to modify. I can’t say exactly what the line of code will look like as all inf's are different depending on complexity but it will have along the lines of "DeviceDesc" at the start of the line followed by the name of the device you are looking for, It doesn’t hurt to read some of the file to get your bearings.
Now you can replace the name in the file with whatever you like just make sure you keep the quotation marks at both ends of the name. Save the file and restart your machine.
This will work for most of devices I’ve had some that are too complicated to bother with so in that case I registry hack is the easiest way to do it.
To modify the name directly from the registry (stoping the registry value from querying the .inf file for name details) you need to get the value for the driver key so again open device manager go to the properties of the device you want to modify, click details tab then scroll down to "driver key" and click it, copy the string then open reg edit and do a search for that string. It should bring you directly to the registry key you are looking for.
You will need to delete the entire value data for the "DeviceDesc" string (you will notice it points to the .inf file for the name) and replace it with just the name you want to name your device. After you are done save, exit and reboot
Hope this helps someone..
Mark