Neo Download

If you have a custom designed computer or its an old computer or you reinstalled the operating system not from system recovery ( or PC Restore), You might not be able to install the drivers for all the hardware installed on your computer.If you go to device manager it would be listed under other device as Unknown Device.

So after windows installation you could get into trouble if the device driver is not found or can not be installed automatically because that device would stop working.So here are the steps to get that issue fixed.

Option 1

Step 1. Open device manager by typing Devmgmt.msc at run.
Step 2. Right mouse click on the unknown device and select properties.
Step 3. On the device properties window click on the Details tab and select Hardware Ids.

Pic-18(a)

Step 4. Here you only need to note down these two information highlighted in the rectangle shown in the above picture-18(a).So as shown in the picture above note down VEN( Vendor ID) -168C ( as shown in the above picture) and DEV ( Part/Device ID )- 0032 as per the above picture.

Step 5. Go to website http://www.pcidatabase.com/ and then under vendor search Type the Vendor ID as 168C or whatever it shows in your device properties windows for that unknown hardware, and then hit search.

Pic-18(b)

Step 6. Now you will see the result on a different page with the name of the Vendor so Click on the Vendor name as shown in the picture -18(c) and then it will show you the list of all the device available from that vendor.

Pic-18(d)

Step 7. so you will need to find the device with code mentioned in the Hardware Ids as DEV which is 0032 in my case.

Pic-18(e)

Step 8. Now here it clearly shows you the name and model of the device we were looking for with the link to find the driver of this device under Notes so you can probably go to that vendors website to download the driver for that particular Device Model which is installed in your PC.


Option 2

Option two is the easiest and best way to identify the unknown device.There is this tool name Hardware Identify from Tweaking.com.you can download it from the download tab of my blog or click here.


Tweaking.com - Hardware Identify will help identify unknown hardware on your system. This program does not help you download drivers but helps let you know what the hardware is so you know what drivers to find.

For example say you just reinstalled a computer and the device manager shows multiple unknown hardware with no drivers installed. Well you dont know what drivers to find since you dont know what the hardware is. Now with Tweaking.com - Hardware Identify you can see what that hardware is.

The program also has a easy option to help improve the device database. Once you have all drivers installed you can have the program check for any hardware on the system that isnt in the database and submit it to Tweaking.com. With in a few days the database will be updated and the device list will grow with the help of users like you!

Picture below was taken from Tweaking .com for the educational and instructional purposes.

Pic-18(f)

Now here again you know the name and model of the device you were looking for so you can probably go to that vendors website to download the driver for that particular Device Model which is installed in your PC.
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Note: Any suggestion or comments to improve this article is very welcome and appreciated.Please write to me at nasir@simulato.com in case you have any queries.

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