Unknown Device–Find a driver?

Have you ever needed to find a driver for something, when you have not actually known what the device is?

It sounds silly i know, but if you ever reinstall a PC you may end up with a tonne of ‘unknown’ devices in Device Manager and having exhausted the available drivers on the manufacturers website, may be scratching your head as to what the device even is, let alone what driver to try.

In my example below i have a PCI Input Device without a driver. Well what the hell is that? Not exactly a handy description.

You can find out some more information about the device by using the Hardware ID of the device. You can find that in the properties of the device under the details tab.

If you change the dropdown menu to ‘Hardware IDs’ you will see what may look like nonsense codes.

The Hardware ID is actually a code specific to that device and that vendor.

PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_7003&SUBSYS_00401102&REV_04

VEN_1102 is a vendor code, and is perhaps unsurprisingly, unique to each vendor. A quick search online tells me this vendor code belongs to ‘Creative Labs’  which may well be enough to identify which device you are looking for a driver for.

Using the Vendor and Device ID codes i can search online and find that the Device in question is the Game Port on my Sound Blaster Audigy card. Being an old card no driver for Windows 7 exists for that particular device.

Hopefully armed with both the Vendor ID and the Device ID you may be able to narrow down any devices you are missing drivers for!