How to Find Vendor and Model of Unknown Drivers

device managerdriverswindows

I reinstalled windows on a new machine and the drivers are not present for the product network card.

When in device manager all I get is the question mark and I am unable to figure out the actual name of the vendor or model of the card. This is making my search to find the correct driver hard.

Anyone know how I to find out more about the hardware that does not have drivers?

Best Answer

Use PCI database (online website)

  1. go to the device manager
  2. open the properties of the unknown device
  3. click on details → Hardware IDs
  4. extract the vendor ID and the device ID like shown in the screenshot
  5. search on the PCI database for the vender and database ID.
    The database is regularly updated by users. Scroll down Intel's page as an example.
    The results will show a driver name which can be googled

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Use Unknown Devices (portable offline tool)

The portable tool even shows old drivers which are normally only visible if you type SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1 in an elevated CMD prompt before opening the device manager.

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Use DriverIdentifier (offline tool with online database)

Install it or extract it with UniExtract if you need a portable version. It will scan your drivers and compare them with its online database.

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