Find Driver For Unknown Device Windows 10

Windows is a fairly intelligent operating system and does a pretty good job automatically detecting and installing new devices; however, sometimes it simply misses the mark.

In that case, when an unknown USB device with an exclamation point appears in the list of USB Controllers, try the following things: Right-click on the device, select Properties, then click button Roll Back Driver on the Driver tab, if it is available, and if not — Uninstall to remove the driver. Impossible to find missing driver for Unknown Device in SVF1532E4E Hello, can anyone advise on how to find driver (Windows 10), for an unknown device in Sony Vaio laptop SVF1532E4E (or SVF153B1YM). I've tried Windows updates, Sony's website, programs like Driver Booster or Driver Update, searching it by the hardware's ID - no luck. You don’t need to know that the Unknown Device is if you update the driver via Device Manager. In this way, Windows will identify and install the driver automatically. To find drivers for unknown devices in Windows, we need to access device manager where you can manage all your hardware device drivers. To open device manager in Windows 8, press “Win + X” to open the power user menu and then select the option “Device Manager.” If you are using Windows 7 or Vista, you can search for the device manager.

Perhaps you just attached a new scanner and now your computer is wiggin’ out or you reinstsalled Windows 8 from scratch but some devices such as your USB printer are acting funny.

Here’s what to do when your devices start acting doltish.

Download Unknown Device Driver

The first place I would check is the Device Manager.

In Windows 8, just press the Windows Key + x + m and scroll through the list looking for any devices with a yellow exclamation sign next to it.

This means that Windows detected the device but couldn’t automatically install the drivers for some reason.

We need to find a way to identify the unknown device so we can throw the ID into Google and grab the drivers. Fortunately, this is super easy.

Right click the mystery device and choose Properties.

In the Device status box you should see the following error:

If you click the Update Driver button and then choose Search automatically for updated driver software you may find something but in my experience this has NEVER worked. If it works for you great, but I’m going to save you loads of time with a little known trick that has a better success rate.

Click on over to the Details tab, click the Property drop down box and select Hardware Ids.

Right click the first ID and choose Copy from the context menu.

The gibberish text in the list is an identification string assigned by the device vendor that matches an INF file.

An INF file is just a text file used to install a driver. Think of the INF as a blueprint for installing a new device. It contains stuff such as the driver name, location, version and registry stuff.

Here’s what the INF file for my monitor looks like:

Thankfully we don’t need to (nor should we) mess with these files. I just wanted to show you an example to clear any confusion.

Alright, now that we have the hardware ID stored on the clipboard we can paste it into our browser and get our driver.

If you’re using Chrome or Firefox, just right-click the address bar and choose Paste and Go.

The first hit looks promising, let’s check that out:

A quick scroll through the forum produces one verified answer. It looks like this my Unknown Device is a Memory Card reader.

Ah, that explains why my laptop never detected my SD cards.

Since I can see the URL comes directly from Lenovo I can trust the executable. But it’s true that malicious hackers can easily make it look like a link is coming from a reliable URL so you shouldn’t trust this alone. For safe measure it’s always a good idea to scan everything you download from the internet (especially .exe files) before running it.

After you find the driver, click through the installation wizard and complete the installation.

Now if you flip back over to the Device Manager you’ll notice the yellow exclamation mark is gone and so is your unknown device.

In my case, if you look near the top of the screenshot you’ll see my unknown device has been correctly identified as a Ricoh PCIe SDXC controller, which is my memory card reader.

Find Driver For Unknown Device Windows 10 Download

You’ll also notice near the bottom under Other Devices, that only PCI Serial Host has an exclamation mark next to it.

Other Devices Unknown

Device

Now I need to find that driver…

Find

Find Driver For Unknown Device Windows 10 Full

I hope this helped you! If not just share your issues in the comments and we’ll get you going.

Dell Unknown Device

Posted in Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 Tagged with: Software, Tricks

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