Mysterious hardware

Hi,

Whenever I start my PC a message appears telling me that some new hardware has been found and do I want to install the drivers for it.

I recently had to reformat my PC because of a problem I had and I'm unsure what hardware I have in it that requires a driver.

When I go to the Device Manager list I can see that there is a 'other devices/multimedia controller' with a question mark next to it.

How would I find out what this device is?

Cheers,

C h r e d g e

 

Right click the yellow ? item in Device Manager, click Properties, then the Details tab. Under "Device Instance Id" you should see a text string like PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3065 (the rest of the string is not usually relevant to finding a driver).

Then on this website: http://www.pcidatabase.com (or a similar one) enter the vendor and device numbers. That should tell you what hardware you have. From there we can help you find a driver for it.

 

I used to have this problem all the time after I'd installed a webcam, and it would try to search out new drivers for it every time I booted Windows. Despite that, the cam still worked perfectly fine so it was a bit confusing.

Do what Frank posted to find the device that its related to, but you might find that it isn't something that's affecting anything you need to do on your computer. Still might be worth installing the drivers just to get rid of the annoying popups though, they got on my nerves after a while.