How to easily find drivers for Unknown Devices in Windows

January 20, 2014

If you're mucking around with a new Windows installation, you're probably going to run into driver headaches. No matter whether you're installing a fresh copy of Windows on a freshly built rig or simply upgrading your PC to a new version of Windows, the OS fails to properly identify all of the hardware connected to the system more often than not. I typically like to download drivers for all of the major components in a PC before I even begin an OS installation, but inevitably a motherboard will have an obscure controller on-board or the system will have a non-descript add-in card that Windows doesn’t recognize. People deal with driver problems in different ways. Some will hit a motherboard manufacturer’s website and search for the mobo, in hopes of identifying a component by the perusing the motherboard’s manual or spec sheet. Some folks resort to yanking the rig apart—ick—and searching the web for random part numbers on chips or cards they don’t recognize. You’ll likely have some success using either method (I have), but there is a much better way to identify unknown devices in Windows—and you don’t have to whip out any tools to do it. Delving into the unknown It may not be obvious, but Windows give you all the information you need to identify unknown and unrecognized devices in Device Manager if you know where to look.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089404/how-to-easily-find-drivers-for-unknown-devices-in-windows.html#tk.rss_howto