Translate

Saturday, March 19, 2016

How to check for generic devices in Windows

When you check your computer management console in devices you may find something like this here:




to get more arround this you should open the properties of this device and check:


1. Click on Details
2. Select under Properties "Hardware IDs"
3. Now you should see something like this here:
(As my own notebook is missing the unknown device I just used the properties of another device. But it is the same procedure and does not matter if the device is known or unknown).






Here the stuff after PCI\VEN is the key. In PCI language this is the manufacturer code of the device. This is what we need:


PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_5227(ignore the rest for now)


VEN = Vendor ID = 10EC (as example in relation to the picture above!)
&DEV = Device ID = 5227 (as example in relation to the picture above!)


Know you are looking in a web database for its meaning.


Visit www.pcidatabase.com and check seach in the Vendor field for: 10EC or the Vendor in your case which may vary (e.g. 8086)




After you found the manufacturer you can click on its name.
This brings you to this Website where you have a list of all known Device IDs from the manufacturer.

Please Keep in mind that this list is not sorted.

Therefore please use CTRL+F and use the search function of your browser to look for the device ID (in my example I would look for 0x5227  (0x which tells you and the System it is hex-decimal number).





When you know what is the right Vendor and device you have a good Chance to identify the right driver on the vendors support page.


This here is a 90% solution. There is also a chance that the device is either not in this list or the vendor does not provide a Driver for your OS.


Depending on the Driver it might be that a Windows 7 or 8/8.1 Driver might also work on Windows 10. Some Driver types have an unchanged Driver model behind. But it allways depend. Try out the new Driver. Just in case you are able to rollback to the driver before.




Good luck!