Verbose logging for the setupapi.log

One thing I recommend to customers from time to time when troubleshooting hardware problems is to turn on verbose logging of the setupapi.log. I recommended it again tonight in the newsgroup and figured I should mention here to share the wealth.

If you're not familiar with the seutpapi.log file, don't worry I'll discuss it in greater detail later. For now, please go look at yours on the PC you're using now (if you're reading this using a Mac, then I'm sorry you can't play with the other boys and girls yet). You will find your log in the root of the Windows directory ( .\windows\setupapi.log).

If you look at it right now, you're going to see probably a thousand to several thousand entries related to the initial setup of your machine as well as device detection and removal with lots of PnP/Vendev goodness. You can see how it's very handy when troubleshooting hardware issues.

Now on to the reason for this article - How to enable *verbose* logging (yeah as if thousands of entries in that log weren't enough i'm offering you the ability to make it tens of thousands if not a hundred thousand+!).

It's this one magical reg key:

HKLM\Software \Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Setup
LogLevel

Right now on your system, that loglevel value is probably DWORD: 0 (verbose = off). Change it to-

DWORD: 0000FFFF

To turn off verboseness just change back to '0'.

Enjoy.

- Andy