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The Device Experience in Windows 7

UPDATED 09/01 2:14PM

I’ve moved the content of this blog post to a separate stand-alone page on the site due to it being so long and how it reads more like a whitepaper rather than a blog post. You can find the new page here.

Written by Brandon LeBlanc on August 31st, 2009 with no comments.
Read more articles on Categories and Taskbar Previews and Aero Peek and Windows Quality Online Services and Device Experience and Devices & Media Team and Winqual and Devices and Printers and Jump List and Device Stage and otherSoftware and windows 7 and XML and Metadata and engineering and devices and Tasks and Partners and Design.

Find Drivers for Unknown Devices

Usually, when you buy any hardware the drivers come along with it on a disc. If you lose the driver disc you can always download the necessary drivers from the manufacturer’s website. But what do you do when you are not sure of the manufacturer of the hardware?

Every device has a Vendor and Device id associated with it. If you can find this ID, you can find the manufacturer. In Windows it’s easy to find the vendor and device id.

Open Device Manager (Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager)
The hardware whose drivers are missing will appear as Unknown device, so it’s easier to locate the device.
Right click on the unknown device and click on Properties.
Under the Properties window click on Details tab and select Device Instance Id from the drop down box.
You should see a code similar to this
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27DC&SUBSYS_30868086
&REV_01\4&1E46F438&0&40F0
The portion of the code highlighted in RED is the Vendor ID and the portion highlighted in GREEN is the Device ID. In this example:
Vendor ID = 8086
Device ID = 27DC
Once you have obtained both the IDs, proceed to PCI Database. There you can either search for the vendor from the vendor ID or directly get information about the device along with the vendor name by searching with the device ID.