Windows Explored

Everyday Windows Desktop Support, Advanced Troubleshooting & Other OS Tidbits

Identifying Unknown Hardware

Posted by William Diaz on July 4, 2010


To see missing drivers for any hardware component just open the System Information utility from Start > Run and type msinfo32. You can also do this remotely with any computer within your network by using the View > Remote Computer option.

Expand the Components heading in the navigation tree and select Problem Devices:

At first glance, the information is for a generic PCI device and this doesn’t help much. However, the information in the PNP ID column actually provides the Vendor (VEN) and Device (DEV) IDs. You can either search the web for these IDs or go to an online PCI Vendor & Device ID site. I used http://www.pcidatabase.com/index.php and came up with the following:

As you can see 29B5 is not listed but we already know that the Vendor is Intel and it the closest match does, in fact, point to (although in French) a Simple PCI Communications Device driver. A little more research pointed to the following:

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