By If you've ever come across the unknown device listing in Window's Device Manager then this may well be of interest to you. Every PC device has a Vendor and Device ID associated with it and the PCI Database website will help you identify those pesky devices.
1. Open Device Manager (Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager)
2. Right click on the Unknown Device and click on Properties.
3. Under the Properties window click on Details tab and select Device Instance Id from the drop down box.
4. You should see a code similar to this
PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_7280&SUBSYS_E190174B&REV_9A\4&2E2DECCC&0&0058
5. 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 = 1002
Device ID = 7280
6. Visit PCI Database, where you can either search by the vendor ID or by searching with the device ID.
7. Once you have the description of the device it should be a simple matter of searching for a driver for that device with Google, Yahoo or any other mass market search engine.
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