The Weaver Family

Ever have a driver failure or corruption, which led to an unknown hardware device showing up in Device Manager?  Trying to find a driver when you don’t know what your dealing with can be frustrating, but there is an easy way to find out what the device is.  Every device has a vendor and a device ID associated with it, and once one find these two IDs you can find out what you’re dealing with and then track down the drivers.

So how does one find the vendor and driver ID?  It’s simple.

1. Open Device Manager (Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager)
2. The hardware whose drivers are missing or corrupt will appear as Unknown Device, so the device should be easy to find.
3. Right click on the device, and click on Properties in the menu.
4. Under the Properties window click on Details tab and select Device Instance Id from the drop down box.
5. You should see a code similar to this:
   PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4222&SUBSYS_10408086&REV_02\4&20975680&0&00E1
6. The portion of the code highlighted in BLUE is the Vendor ID and the portion highlighted in RED is the Device ID. In this example:
   Vendor ID = 8086
   Device ID = 4222
7. 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.
8. Using the example above, and searching the database, you get the following information:
   0×4222    Intel 3945ABG Wireless LAN controller    0×8086    Intel Corporation

Once you have the vendor and device information, you can go to the vendor’s website, or if the vendor is out of business go to someplace like driverguide.com which has drivers for all different types of hardware.

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