Content

• Steps

When your computer's hardware has problems but you don't know the part type or manufacturer, you can use the device's Hardware ID for identification. The Hardware ID allows you to find out the manufacturer and model of nearly all of the hardware in your computer, even if the device is not working.

Steps

Part 1 of 2: Find the Hardware ID

1. 

   Open Device Manager. This feature lists all the connected hardware and displays the devices that are not working properly. Here are a few different ways to open Device Manager:
   • On all versions of Windows - Press ⊞ Win+R then type devmgmt.msc. Device Manager will launch.
   • On all versions of Windows Open the Control Panel and switch the view to Large or Small with the drop-down menu in the upper right. Then you select "Device Manager".
   • On Windows 8.1 Right-click the Start button and select "Device Manager".

2. 

   
   
   Right click on the device you want to check and choose "Properties". You can view the properties of "Unknown devices" or other malfunctioning device to find the appropriate driver.
   • The device with an error will have a "!" small.
   • You can expand the categories by clicking the "+".

3. 

   
   
   Click the card.Details (Detail). The Property dialog box and the Value box will appear.

4. 

   Select "Hardware Ids" from the drop-down menu. A number of different items will appear in the Value box. This is the hardware ID of the device. You can use these IDs to assist in identifying and finding the right driver for the device. Please see the following section for more details. advertisement

Part 2 of 2: Using Hardware ID to find driver

1. 

   
   
   Right-click on the first ID and select "Copy". List oil is usually the primary ID and has the most characters. Please right-click this ID to copy to clipboard on PC.

2. 

   Paste the hardware ID into the Google search bar. You will know what device this is, this information is very useful in identifying the fault that the hardware is facing.

3. 

   Add "driver" to the end of the search term. Google will return the results containing the driver file for this type of hardware. You can also use the information you found in the previous step to download the appropriate driver from the manufacturer's support site.

4. 

   Understand the structure of the Hardware ID. Although there is no need to decode the entire ID, but there are two data that will help us identify the product if the Google search is not effective. VEN_XXXX is the code that represents the manufacturer (vendor). Still DEV_XXXX is the specific model of the device. Here are some codes VEN_XXXX Frequent:
   • Intel - 8086
   • ATI / AMD - 1002/1022
   • NVIDIA - 10DE
   • Broadcom - 14E4
   • Atheros - 168C
   • Realtek - 10EC
   • Creative - 1102
   • Logitech - 046D

5. 

   Use the Device Hunt website to retrieve hardware information. You can use the Vendor ID and Device that you extracted above to search the database at. Please enter 4 Vendor ID numbers (VEN_XXXX) in the Vendor ID search field, or the 4 Device ID numbers (DEV_XXXX) into the appropriate field, then click the "Search" button.
   • The database is large, but not all hardware is available. Where you do not find the result it is possible.
   • The database is designed for PCI slot hardware including graphics cards, sound cards, and network adapters.
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