Thursday, February 21, 2008

How to find an unknown device in windows

You've just installed windows on a computer.

You have a few unknown devices in the device manager. You google the title of this post.

Bingo! microsoft have an answer
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314464

So you go to windows update website and you bend over backwards activating then genuine validating your windows system.

Windows update begins. . . .

Hardware updates are in custom updates section. It finds one newer driver for the network card already installed.

What do i do now?. Well normally i would have know what card went into the computer because i would have brough the card initially but i'm in a university lab on a university computer. Okay so just pop the cover of and start googleing serial numbers.

I don't have a screw driver this second and in fact i also have linux on this machine so i could just boot in to that and run the 'lspci' command. Or i could put a knoppix cd i have next to me and then run 'lspci' but i want to do it in windows.

So i ring the Oracle, He has two ways of doing it. One reboot the computer and get pci id of the bios screen or secondly a nice gentleman named craig has created a lspci command for windows

See pci32.exe @ http://members.datafast.net.au/dft0802/downloads.htm

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