Troubleshooting Drivers

To begin troubleshooting drivers and devices it’s recommended to start with the windows utility “device manager“. The windows device manager will display all the current devices installed on your system and it will also display the current state of the devices. Typically when a yellow question mark hovers over the device name it means that the hardware is not properly configured almost always means there is a missing driver.

At this point you could do some driver research to find the adequate driver or if you have backed up your device configurations then a simple restore should bring everything back, however 9 out of 10 times this is not an available option. Through the device manager you can simply right click on the device that needs attention and select the options that says: “Update Driver Software“, this will bring up a windows driver wizard that will help you scour your local hard drive for a suitable device driver. If none is found locally, the wizard will attempt to connect to the internet to find the proper driver. Normally this operations is hardly ever successful since the device driver many not be found on the list of Microsoft certified device drivers, in other words windows has no signature for the driver and therefore no reference as to where to locate it.

This does not make troubleshooting drivers easy. In most cases the user has to do online research by identifying the device manufacturer and visiting the vendor’s website to find drivers for their failing devices. This can be time consuming and not always successful. On the other hand if the PC came with a resources CD when it was purchased it can certainly help in bringing the hardware to an operable state again until a newer driver can be found.

The biggest roadblock when troubleshooting a missing driver is when dealing with generic devices, such as those manufactured overseas. When the manufacturer is unknown the task is nearly impossible to accomplish. If this is the case with your PC, the recommended action would be to contact the vendor who sold you your PC and ask for a resources disk that may contain the original driver software that as installed on your PC when they built it or sold it to you.

If the PC vendor can not help with the driver research, then the next best thing to do is to download and install a driver scan utility that can search drivers. There are free and paid versions of these utilities, and they’re not all reliable so take some time to research and read reviews about these tools. These programs can make troubleshooting drivers very simple and effective, one of the leading producers of such tools is Pareto Logic and its “Driver Cure” utility which is able to scour through thousands of hardware and software manufacturer databases to locate most any driver.