Find drivers for unknown devices

Have you ever been given a com­pu­ter, or bought an old fixer upper PC that didn’t have all the discs or infor­ma­tion for the components?

I know this is frus­tra­ting since I too have had this pro­blem.  Espe­cially when it invol­ves key equip­ment (Net­work card).  There is nothing more irri­ta­ting then loo­king at your device list and seeing the yellow ques­tion mark.  Well tech­ni­cians, as with almost everything com­pu­ter rela­ted, there is a site setup to help with this.  PCIDatabase.com

So how does this work?

You will want to go to the ques­tion mark in the device mana­ger and right click on the entry (there maybe more then one on a rei­mage or a cus­tom built machine).  For those that may not be fami­liar on how to get to the device mana­ger here are some sim­ple steps.  Find the My Com­pu­ter icon on your desk­top (upper left by default).  You will want to Right click on the icon and you will get a menu like this:

After you left click on the pro­per­ties entry a new win­dow will pop up:
If you do not have the tab shown, you will want to click on the Hard­ware tab.  Once here, click on the device mana­ger and you will see a list of ins­ta­lled devi­ces.  You will scroll down for the yellow ques­tion mark.  In my exam­ple there are none, but I am sure you will find them rather quickly.

Once you find the first one, you will want to Right Click on the device and open the pro­per­ties.  There will be a tab across the top lis­ted as details.  You will want to make sure it is the selec­ted tab.  In this tab you will be pre­sen­ted with this infor­ma­tion:
The high­light shows you impor­tant infor­ma­tion, the VEN is the manu­fac­tu­rer of the device and the DEV is the device iden­ti­fied.  Per­so­nally I find the device iden­ti­fied more help­ful, but that is just me.

We are now armed with the infor­ma­tion, now how do we use it?  Well we will want to be on the inter­net and go to the web­site: PCIDatabase.com

Input the ven­dor infor­ma­tion and you will be shown a screen like so:

One the left side it shows the device id.  Now that you have the desc­rip­tion and the ven­dor name (right side) it is very easy to find the dri­vers right on the Manu­fac­tu­rers web­site.  Hope this has been helpful.