Finding drivers for unrecognized hardware in a Windows system
by Mats Hellman on Mar.24, 2009, under Windows
Sometimes when you finish installing your Windows operating system you are missing drivers. The easy ones like chipset,network and graphics are easy to find, but what about the rest? Below is a screenshot of the details on the Intel Gigabit network card. Nothing special there, it’s installed and it’s working fine.
If Windows wouldn’t be able to find drivers for it the Details pane would still be visible and you would se the Device Instance Id. From that one line we can get everything we need. So let’s try it out.
In the beginning of the line PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_10BD&SUBSYS…. VEN stands for the Vendor, this being Intel and DEV for the device in question. So now that we know this much just head over to pcidatabase.com and enter the DEV id 10BD into the device search.
Voila. As you can se we now have both the vendor and the device. Now just head over to the vendor website to get your drivers. If you think this is a mess and don’t want to do it the hard way there are software’s doing the exact same thing, but it’s always good to know how to search for them yourself and where to find the information in case you need it.
As a last note, this was made on a Windows XP Professional desktop but the same system applies to Vista and the Server operating systems.
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7 Comments for this entry
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About the author
I'm Mats Hellman and I'm systems administrator working for Folkhälsan, a healthcare organization in Finland. If you like the posts subscribe to the RSS Feed
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April 23rd, 2009 on 22:25
Hay there, thanks for the advice. I purchased an old dell desktop, that works fairly well, or so I thought. I used a program to see if all my drivers were current, alas about twenty were behind the current curve. Most of what I learn is by trial and error. I’ve tried to download updates from some companies, with variable success. Do you have any advice when downloading updates to drivers? i.e. one at a time, several at a time, (from the same manuf. same type of device) etc. Some of the “free download drivers” websites are almost totally worthless. I prefer to go to the source.
Thanks,
Dennis
April 27th, 2009 on 10:15
Usually the drivers from the hardware vendor works best. At least in my case. But there are drivers that you have to get from the device manufacturer, graphic cards for example. I can’t install a stock nVidia/Ati driver on most laptops.
I’ve installed many drivers at once and never had any problems but I guess if you want to be safe install one and if it wants to reboot, you reboot.
Lenovo supplies a nice way of updating/installing drivers called Thinkvantage but I read somewhere they are about to put it down which makes me sad. Thinkvantage is one of the things that keeps me getting IBM/Lenovo devices.
Those free drivers sites you talk about have never really helped me out. The best way is still looking at the hardware in you computer and getting Intel drivers from Intel, nVidia from nVidia and so on.
If you can’t sort out the hardware there are programs that do it for you.
July 18th, 2009 on 17:42
what do you think are the best software choices for hardware ID
July 18th, 2009 on 23:18
yeswings: I’m sorry but I really don’t understand what you mean.
July 22nd, 2009 on 05:45
I use this on my notebook and desktop. I’ve had my notebook for 6 yrs now and this id the best I came across. Hope things work out. Your going to have to pay for the software. DRIVER ROBOT
July 28th, 2009 on 06:36
This is kind of a crap-shoot, works sometimes, sometimes not. Generally it seems to do better with older devices.
February 28th, 2010 on 02:55
Better off to use a tool like DriverAgent. http://www.driveragent.com. My time is worth more than this. An improperly installed driver can totally screw up your system.