How to find out what drivers are on your PC. DriverPack Solution to help

Hello friends!

Finding and installing drivers is a real headache for many novice PC users.

In this article, we will look at several examples of where and how to look for drivers for your computer or laptop.

Most often, the problem with finding drivers occurs after reinstalling the operating system. Windows systems. I wrote about how to reinstall Windows using a disk in this. Windows installation from a flash drive

How do I know which devices need drivers installed? To do this, click right key mouse (right-click) on the computer icon → select the properties tab → Device Manager.

IN in this example, all drivers are installed correctly and work correctly. If one of the items shows question mark , which means we will need to search for a driver for this device.

Usually, when you purchase a laptop or assembled computer, it comes with a disk with the necessary drivers and utilities. The laptop comes with one disk with all the drivers, and the computer separately; usually these are drivers for the chipset, video card, driver sound card, lan..etc. Everything is simple here, install the disk and start the installation necessary drivers.

Before searching for device drivers for your system, I highly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the five hardware ones. If there is no driver disk, use method 2.

Download drivers from the manufacturer's official website

Let's look at an example Asus laptop K42f. We go to the official Asus website and in the search we ask this model. Select the tab → download and indicate your operating system (you can find out the system by going to → My Computer → (rpm) → Properties).

We are looking for all the necessary drivers. Most important drivers these are Chipset, Sound, VGA, LAN (network) drivers, etc. If this method does not help, use the next, third method.

Search for a driver by device code.

Let's go back to Device Manager. Computer → pcm → Properties. Let's say we don't have an audio controller driver...see the picture.

Right-click on it and select → properties. IN open window select the “Information” tab, and in the drop-down menu you need to select → “ Equipment ID" (in Windows XP " Device Instance ID»).

Example of such code VEN_8086&DEV_0046. Select it with the left key and copy it by pressing the key combination Ctrl+C. Now go to the website www.devid.info In the search field paste ( Ctrl+V) copied code.
Click “Ok”, after which a list of drivers for this device will appear → download and install. It didn’t work → use the 4th method.

On any modern computer are used special drivers for each installed device. Device manufacturers periodically improve them to correct operation All computer components require constant monitoring of the driver status. To view device driver information, you can use and third party programs, And standard means operating system. You will need:

— personal computer or laptop();

— Driver Pack Solution application.

Instructions

• Current;
• Outdated;
• Standard;
• Unknown.

Go to required section and find the device you need.

1. To view information about the driver, you need to hover your mouse over the corresponding item, and all the information will appear near the cursor. It is advisable to update outdated drivers on your computer, to do this, go to the “Outdated” section, mark the corresponding devices with markers and execute the “Install” command. Next, select automatic installation mode and start the driver update process.
2. To view more detailed information about installed drivers can be used standard features Windows operating system. To do this, go to the “Start” menu, find and click on “Computer” with the right mouse button. IN context menu select "Properties". An additional dialog box will appear in which you need to go to the “Device Manager” section.
3. In the dialog box that opens, a list of all installed devices. To view information about the required driver, right-click on the device of interest and select “Properties”. Go to the “Driver” tab and click on the “Details” button.

Video: How to install or update drivers using DriverPack Solution

Hello regular readers of the blog site. In previous articles, we discussed with you such issues as automatic and manual installation drivers for computers and laptops. But sometimes a situation occurs when the driver is not installed either manually or automatic mode because Windows cannot determine which driver is needed. Typically, such a device is marked in the device manager with a yellow triangle with exclamation point, which says that the driver is not installed or the device is not working correctly.

In addition, the device manager does not yet tell you what exactly this equipment is and why exactly you need to look for a driver.

Let's look at the principle of identifying and searching for the right driver. Although I have all the devices installed, I will still show you with an example. Moreover, it will be additional check- have we identified the driver correctly? So, let's go to the device manager and imagine that I don't have drivers for the webcam. So, we launch the device manager and find the equipment we need. In my case it's a web camera.

In the properties window, open the details tab and select “Hardware ID”

This is where the device identifier comes in. Namely, from here we need to take two parameters by which we will determine the device and its driver.

The first parameter is VID 045E

The second parameter is PID 0779

In principle, we only need numbers without any underscores or other characters.

At this stage, the principle of determining the driver is that we need to find information about this device on the Internet using these two parameters, i.e. what is it called?

So, we enter VID and PID in search bar(for example in Yandex) and click “Find”

In the search results, we look at which device our VID and PID are defined for. Here I see a site on which a device with my values ​​is indicated. Let's go to this site.

Yeah, I see! Now I know what kind of device the driver requires. At this stage, we just found out which device needs updating or installing “firewood”.

Now we need to find the official website of the developer of this equipment. To do this, enter the name into the search engine and click on the “Find” button. In the search results we find the official website. In my case it is "Microsoft". You can have any other manufacturer, but the principle remains the same for everyone.

We go to the official website (from there we will definitely download real drivers without any viruses). We find the support or downloads section (depending on the manufacturer’s website). Select a device (in my case it is a web camera). We find our model.

Now all we have to do is unpack and run the file with the “.exe” extension.

is the software that is needed to normal operation computer hardware. Some drivers are installed automatically, but in most cases, users have to take care of this themselves. If you have a disk with drivers, then installing them is not challenging task. But it often happens that the disk is lost. In this case, you have to. Today we will talk about how to find out which driver is needed for .

In order to find out which driver is needed for a video card, you need to know which video card is installed on your computer. You can get information about the installed video card in different ways. If a video card driver is already installed on your computer and you want to update it, then the name of the video card can be found in the “Device Manager”. To launch Device Manager, simply open the Start menu and use the search.

After launching GPU-Z you will see small window With detailed information about your video card. At the top of this window there is text string“Name”, the name is indicated here installed video card. IN in this case, the screenshot shows the video card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950.

Just below, in the “Subvender” text field, the manufacturer of the video card is indicated. In this case it is ASUS. If your system has several video cards installed, then you can view information about each of them. To do this, use the drop-down list located at the bottom of the GPU-Z window.

So, we already know what model of video card we have, but how do we find out which driver is needed for the video card?

Once we have determined the model and manufacturer of the video card, we can begin to search for a driver for our video card. If you have a video card from ATI/AMD, then go to and fill out the form to search for a driver.

After we have filled out all the fields of the search form, click on the “Display Results” button. Next, a page will load on which you will be prompted to download the driver for the video card.

If you have a video card from nVidia, then you need to use the search form.

This search form works in a similar way: select the model of your video card and fill out the remaining fields. After clicking on the “Search” button, you will be offered the required driver.

Owners of laptops, as well as owners of stationary computer terminals, sometimes need to install or update device drivers themselves, despite the fact that initially the system installs almost all of them itself. Read on to learn how to update drivers on a laptop. we'll talk. Several basic methods are offered for consideration, which, without special problems can be used by any user, and this applies not only to laptops. Some solutions will also be useful in the case of stationary PCs running Windows operating systems.

What drivers are needed for a laptop?

In general, if we proceed from the basic understanding that a driver is special software for managing hardware and some virtual devices, it is not difficult to guess that their installation is mandatory for absolutely all components that are included in the configuration being used.

Let's not talk about it for now virtual devices, but let’s focus on computer hardware. Actually, view all installed components possible in the standard “Device Manager”, additionally enabling the display hidden devices. Here, with the exception of special controllers, all the hardware is presented (monitors, keyboards, touchpads, graphics, sound and network cards, cameras, additional ports, card readers and much more).

Automatic installation of drivers when installing Windows

Initially, at the operating system installation stage, all the main drivers are installed automatically by the OS itself using its own database or system updates when connected to the Internet. However, in most cases, standard (most suitable) drivers are installed, the versions of which may be out of date.

In addition, the laptop may include some devices for which the drivers contained in installation distribution, may be missing, for example, some Wi-Fi drivers. In this case, you will have to install them on the laptop yourself.

You can see that the driver for such a component is missing or installed incorrectly in the same “Device Manager”, where the non-working component will be marked yellow marker. You can, of course, use the update directly from here, but if you don’t have such a driver in your own database, you don’t have to try to perform such operations (it won’t give any effect anyway).

On the other hand, you can use either the original driver disk, which mandatory supplied when purchasing the device, or use disk utilities like DriverPack Solution, which contain expanded databases compared to those used by Windows systems. In this case, you don’t even need to think about which drivers to install on your laptop, since utilities of this rank install all the necessary software automatically and can even completely update drivers to current versions, however, subject to an Internet connection. Let's dwell on this separately.

How to find drivers for non-standard equipment?

Now let's see what can be done to update if the driver for some component is missing in the system database. Searching the Internet for a site to download software, asking in the search, for example, “Wi-Fi drivers for a laptop” is a thankless task.

This is understandable, because each specific component requires a specific driver version. But how can you find out exactly what this component is? To do this, you need to use the same “Device Manager”, select the desired device, use the RMB menu to call up the properties section and go to the details tab.

Here, in the drop-down menu located at the top of the window, you need to select the equipment ID, after which one or more lines containing the values ​​of VEN and DEV will be displayed in the window below. These are the ones unique identifiers, which allow you to accurately identify the device. If several lines appear, you need to select the longest one, copy it or write it down, and then search for drivers using these values ​​(to do this, you can use specialized sites or contact the driver developer’s resource or the laptop manufacturer’s website).

Contacting support

In general, visiting the website of the laptop manufacturer is the most best solution. As a rule, such resources have a special support section where you can find and use online configuration testing tools.

This may take quite a lot of time, but in the results you will be able to see not only the main system parameters, but also an assessment of performance or energy consumption, as well as information about missing or incorrectly installed drivers. You can install or update drivers on your laptop directly on the website. In this case, a full guarantee of the functionality of the device is provided after installing the appropriate software or updates.

How to update drivers on a laptop (Windows 7) in the classic way

But in some cases, you can update the driver yourself if it becomes outdated or the device is not working. Drivers for a laptop (Windows 10, 8, 7 or any other version) can be updated from the “Device Manager”.

Via RMB, just select the update item software device or, using the properties menu, click on the corresponding button. However, the software will be reinstalled using the databases of the system itself. In this case, even deleting the device and re-identifying it will not help.

Problems with driver installation and hardware performance

But sometimes updating drivers on a laptop using this method turns out to be very problematic. In such a situation, if the user has downloaded and saved the updated driver on the hard drive or removable media, you should either search for drivers on this computer, or use the browse button to install exact location the required software.

As already mentioned, drivers can be found through the use of identifiers. Otherwise, the system will install what it considers most relevant.

Update using special utilities

It is believed that it is possible to update drivers on a laptop and more simple method, which consists of using special applications for automatic search and installation of driver updates.

You can use the utility described above (DriverPack Solution) or ask for help from Driver programs Booster, Slim Drivers and the like. After the application starts, it starts an automatic scan and gives a verdict on the state of the drivers. To update, simply agree to the offer to install updates, wait for the process to complete, and restart the computer system.

Please note: since such programs access directly the websites of developers or equipment manufacturers, an uninterrupted Internet connection is required to search and install updates.

Brief summary

That, in fact, is all that concerns updating the necessary drivers for laptops. It remains to answer the last question regarding which of the proposed solutions is best to use. Perhaps many users will agree that searching for and installing updates manually is a rather labor-intensive and time-consuming process. This approach can only be used in cases where there is no Internet at home, and the search is carried out from another device and in another place. If everything is in order with the connection, in order not to suffer, the easiest way is to install some utility automatic update, especially since in this case necessary drivers will be installed, and the equipment will work correctly, since initially the drivers are downloaded directly from the resources of developers and manufacturers. And virus infection is reduced to almost zero, in contrast to situations where the user downloads it independently, and even from dubious sites.