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Find drivers for an unknown device

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This weekend I had to reinstall a Windows XP machine for my daughter, she got her first PC :). So she couldn't wait and it had to be installed right away. So I had to put in a new disk because the old one crashed and died. Installed Windows XP SP2 (Dutch Version) onto the box. And guess what everything was fine beside one device which Windows XP did not recognize. How do you solve this? Through the blogpost (in Dutch) of one of my colleagues Tony Krijnen I found the procedure again to find out which device it is.

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Let me explain to you how I found the driver for this unknown audio device. First open the device manager (I suppose you know how to do that) and double click onto the unknown device. A new window will open and here you have to select the details tab and choose Hardware-Id's (see screenshot).

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Here you see the Hardware ID for the unknown device it's defined as follows

BUS \ VEN_[xxxx] Dev_[yyyy]

So BUS means on which kind of hardware bus it is connected to,this can be PCI, USB, IDE, etc ....
The VEN means the vendor this piece of hardware and the DEV can be the device type of the vendor.

 

How can you look this up? Easy there is a website devoted to that and its called https://www.pcidatabase.com. I looked for the vendor 1106 which is VIA Technologies and within the vendor page I looked for the Device ID 3059 which returned "AC97 Enhanced Audio Controller".

The next step is straight forward I just looked up the driver for the "AC97 Enhanced Audio Controller" device and installed it.

 

Technorati tags: Windows XP

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2007
    Thank you for the kind words and yes I agree it's not that easy to find drivers without registering for one of those sites and I don't like them either.

  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2007
    I'm CEO of a computer business and this has been the best tip, ever. Saved my lappy!

  • Anonymous
    November 11, 2008
    i dont have a sound drivers so can u get some to dwonlaod now pls ,this is my id michaelnortey2002@yahoo.com, so if any info, thanks

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2009
    Thanx bro. It's So simple and clear.

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2009
    Try driverguide.com for drivers