I’ve fooled around with enough mobile devices to run into this problem at least a dozen times. Here’s the situation: you don’t have drivers for everything and there are some mystery devices in the Windows Device Manager that go by the non-descript name of “PCI Device”. Gee, thanks for the help there PC!Armed with that information you then… what, exactly? TechNet has a solution: hop over to PCIDatabase.com, an on-line database filled with user-supported information on PCI devices. You can search by Vendor or Device to help identify the mystery component. To test it out, I checked the Fast Ethernet NIC on my MSI Wind through the Windows XP Device Manager. I clicked the Properties of the device and then hit the Details tab. In the dropdown menu, choosing “Hardware IDs” usually offers a number of identifying strings, only they likely won’t identify anything that you can gain meaning from.I picked a random string of characters from the WiFi card Details like this one: “PCIVEN_10EC&DEV_8136&CC_0200″ The important bits are the hex values after VEN and DEV; they represent the Vendor and Device IDs. Lo and behold, PCIDatabase keys off of those two fields so entering 8136 in the Device ID field returns the proper device, as shown.
The identified device is also a clickable link that offers information specific to the vendor so you can start to zero in on the appropriate drivers. I’ve bookmarked this for future use as I know I’ll need it again.
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