Monitor hardware change events

I have a laptop that periodically notifies me that some piece of hardware was installed/removed by playing the little ba-dum sound. I have no idea what hardware is changing - I am not adding or removing any devices. Is there a piece of software or maybe a PowerShell script I can run that hooks into WMI or whatever similar event would actually trigger the sound to be played and get more info on what device is appearing or vanishing from my system? I would love to know what is causing this so I can replace/reconfigure/retire this piece of hardware.

Update 1: The hardware is an HP 8760w laptop, with a dock. The issue is definitely more pronounced when docked.

Update 2: I opened the Device Manager and switched the View menu choice to Devices By Connection, and expanded every element of the tree. Through some process of elimination and just watching it, I narrowed it down to the element shown in the picture below. There is a "Generic USB Hub" attached to what appears might be related to the fingerprint reader. As I have no need for the fingerprint reader, or any of the USB Hubs attached to EHCI controller 1C2D - I just disabled it in the device manager for now. I may look and see if I can just disable the fingerprint reader in the BIOS.

clipping from device manager

Update 3: I want to still leave this open as there is not an answer to "detect hardware changes" through software/script/PowerShell/WMI something. The human parser is only so accurate with finite timing :)

Goyuix

Posted 2012-07-06T15:25:20.850

Reputation: 6 021

Good question. I have exactly the same thing. I've looked around and found a number of people reporting the same thing but no one seems to know the source of the problem. – snowdude – 2012-07-06T15:37:42.527

Naive guess: probably it's powering down the optical drive. I've seen that sometimes. – Shinrai – 2012-07-06T15:53:08.497

What kind of laptop is this? Because I had the same problem with mine. – imtheman – 2012-07-06T16:17:02.757

Answers

In Device Manager double-click on some device (in this case it's one of my ethernet ports) go to Power Management and uncheck Allow computer to turn off this device to save power. Do this for every device that has that option. You'll need to go to each of them manually, then once that's done, and you don't get that sound anymore, go through and check each box again until it starts happening again.

Power Management

imtheman

Posted 2012-07-06T15:25:20.850

Reputation: 3 503

I am a bit skeptical (but honestly more lazy) that this would solve the problem. It just doesn't sound right that Win7 would "notify" me that it was putting a device to sleep. Also, this isn't constant - it tends to kind of come and go so testing it would be somewhat painful to verify. I am really hoping for something that would monitor hardware changes and let me know what is changing so I can narrow down the search. – Goyuix – 2012-07-06T16:21:02.510

Before you do that though, what kind of laptop is it? Does it have a card reader? – imtheman – 2012-07-06T16:33:22.770

If you do, do you happen to have one of those blank sd cards in it like this: http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f123/newgeardeals/TP350/TP350.jpg

– imtheman – 2012-07-06T17:35:01.630

Yes it has a SD Card blank like in the picture (though branded HP and appears to be full size instead of slightly shorter) – Goyuix – 2012-07-06T17:57:03.953

Take it out, and see if the problem still occurs. – imtheman – 2012-07-06T17:57:42.903

Took it out and the behavior is the same. I still get the audible notification every so often... probably 15-20 or so over the last 10 minutes – Goyuix – 2012-07-06T18:10:08.513

Try taking out your Express card filler too. In my laptop I took both of those and it stopped. Your problem might be different though... – imtheman – 2012-07-06T18:12:32.277

I had a similar issue driving me crazy for 6 months. I tried to disable many hardware parts and finally found the broken device: my "Biometric Device". I just disabled it and observed no random hardware changes any more. I enabled it again and the bouncing sound came back again.

I don't need that hardware on my laptop. I just kept it disabled and everything is ok now, I don't remove it because I don't want to see the orange triangle on my device manager.

wangine

Posted 2012-07-06T15:25:20.850

Reputation: 1

1Can you please [edit] your answer to clean up the grammar? Right now, it looks like it was written by a 7 year old, not by a computer enthusiast/professional (our target audience). Thanks. – Canadian Luke – 2014-07-16T01:59:17.297

Actualy my grammar don't matter if the solution what i give is right. I se many peoples with that problem all with same brand ' HP ' , I am Russian . maybe if u try to speak my language you will have same grammar .and i am not computer entusiast, i am programmer under Gg (C for Graphics) i programming vertex and pixel shaders, maybe you try to write in russian or chineze to understant why is not easy for me,thx – wangine – 2014-07-16T16:01:51.357

Following very easy and basic (syntactic!) rules will already change a lot: capitalize the I, no spaces before colons and dots, but one after. – Jens Erat – 2014-07-17T19:43:14.190