Sometimes when you finish installing your Windows operating system you are missing drivers. The easy ones like chipset,network and graphics are easy to find, but what about the rest? Below is a screenshot of the details on the Intel Gigabit network card. Nothing special there, it’s installed and it’s working fine.
If Windows wouldn’t be able to find drivers for it the Details pane would still be visible and you would se the Device Instance Id. From that one line we can get everything we need. So let’s try it out.
In the beginning of the line PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_10BD&SUBSYS…. VEN stands for the Vendor, this being Intel and DEV for the device in question. So now that we know this much just head over topcidatabase.com and enter the DEV id 10BD into the device search.
Voila. As you can se we now have both the vendor and the device. Now just head over to the vendor website to get your drivers. If you think this is a mess and don’t want to do it the hard way there are software’s doing the exact same thing, but it’s always good to know how to search for them yourself and where to find the information in case you need it.
As a last note, this was made on a Windows XP Professional desktop but the same system applies to Vista and the Server operating systems.
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