If Microsoft would not include support for thousands of devices by default, you would have to supply those drivers during installation. Last time I had to do that was when I installed Windows XP SP2 on a SATA hard drive. I had to load the SATA driver during installation so that Windows identified the hard drive correctly.

Default drivers may be all you need to work with your operating system, but if you experience device related problems, or want additional functionality, then third party drivers and driver updates are your best bet. One example: While it is perfectly fine to use the standard Windows keyboard driver with your shiny new media keyboard, you may want to use the media or macro keys on your keyboard, which you probably can’t with the standard driver. That’s where you may want to update the hardware driver of the keyboard to get that functionality.

But it is not all about new functionality. It can also be about performance or stability. Video card drivers usually improve the card’s performance with every update. Gamers benefit from those updates, as do users who rely on their video cards for other tasks, for instance video editing or recording.

Identify Hardware and Manufacturers

The first thing that you need to do is to identify the manufacturer and model of the device. The model is especially important, as manufacturers often release different versions of a hardware which may use different Windows drivers.

I’m going to show you manual and automatic ways of looking up model and manufacturer of devices in Windows.

Manual hardware identification

The information about model and manufacturer may be out in the open, for instance engraved on the computer mouse or wireless router, or hidden from sight if the hardware is internal. The receipt or instructions manual may reveal information about hardware as well. Still, there is usually no way around diving into the Windows Control Panel to get detailed information about the PC’s hardware and devices.

The following guide is based on the Windows 7 operating system. Users of previous Windows operating systems will however find lots of similarities.

Click the Start Orb at the left of the taskbar and select Control Panel from the menu that pops out. Select System and Security > Device Manager from the list of available Control Panel applets.

You find a listing of all devices that are currently connected to the PC. The devices are sorted into various categories like network adapters, display adapters or DVD/CD-Rom devices. You need to double-click on the name of the hardware group or a single-click on the arrow.

Sometimes, that is all you need to do to identify the hardware model right away. If you look at the screenshot above, you see that my computer has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 display adapter. Now, this does not really tell you anything about the manufacturer of the card, only that it is based on NVIDIA hardware. This is different from other hardware like the devices listed under disk drives, where you see the manufacturer directly.

Display drivers are special, as you often have the choice between NVIDIA’s reference drivers that get updated frequently, or drivers by the card’s manufacturer who may not update the drivers that frequently but sometimes have additional features built-in that are not available if the reference drivers are installed.

Keep the device manager window open and fire up a web browser to find and download the drivers.

Driver Download

I tend to install the reference drivers because of the frequent updates. Now that you have found the name and model of your hardware you need to locate the latest drivers on the Internet. A good start is an Internet search for that name and model number followed by drivers, for instance Geforce GTX 470 drivers. You can also search for manufacturer and drivers, for instance Logitech drivers or Ati drivers. Another possibility is to search for the homepage of the manufacturer instead, e.g. Samsung homepage or Intel homepage.

The domain names usually include the company name, e.g. nvidia.com or logitech.com. These sites usually link to drivers on their homepage. If you cannot find a drivers link try the downloads section or support section instead.

Locate the driver for your device and operating system, and compare its version number to the version installed on your computer. Sometimes you do not know which driver version you have installed. You can find that out under the Drivers tab of the device properties.

Compare the driver version and date to the latest version displayed on the driver download website. If the version on the website appears to be newer, download it to your computer.

You can alternatively use a third party website like Driver Zone to locate the right device drivers for your hardware.

Install driver

You can simply double-click on the downloaded driver to install it on the system. That’s usually all it takes. Some cautious users may want to uninstall the active device driver first before they install the new one. This can be done by selecting Driver > Uninstall from the hardware’s properties dialog in the Windows Device Manager. Sometimes you may need to restart the computer after you have installed the new driver.

Automatic Options

Software can assist you greatly when it comes to updating device drivers. A free program like Hardware Info 32 displays valuable information that the Windows device manager does not. You get information like the name of the company that sold the video card, or the exact motherboard version.

This makes it a lot easier to find the appropriate drivers on the Internet.

There is also software that can scan the computer for hardware and drivers, and compare those drivers versions to an online database. Device Doctor is a free application that can do that. Just start the program, select Scan from the list and you get a list of available driver updates with download buttons.

Some words of advice though. You should compare the drivers that are offered by applications like Device Doctor with the version and model installed on your computer to avoid installing the wrong or outdated drivers. I’d also refrain from installing chipset drivers this way.

Let me know how you update your hardware drivers in Windows.

The portable application offers a flat view mode for all devices that are currently connected to the operating system. The data can be sorted in various ways by clicking on one of the columns of the table. Listed are information like the device name, manufacturer, service, device type code, the driver version, description, date or inf file.

Another option that is not available in the standard Windows Device Manager is the ability to enable, disable or uninstall multiple devices at once. DevManView can also list the devices of a remote computer if the current user has administrator rights on that computer system as well.

All or selected devices can be saved to a text file. Another option is the generation of an html report which will create a html file with detailed information about all or selected devices.

DevManView is an alternative to the Windows Device Manger. It is fully portable, supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows and compatible with most Windows operating systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. It can be downloaded from the Nirsoft website.

It is possible to write a simple batch script that can turn computer hardware off. Might be a handy for users who connect their mobile computer to a power source and use it on the road as well. They would simply turn off the unnecessary computer hardware on the road and turn it on again once it is connected to a power source again.

The creation does not require programming skills but you need to know a bit about the computer hardware installed on your system. Not all hardware should be disabled, possibilities include

• Audio Devices
• Network Adapters
• Wireless Networking Adapters
• CD, DVD and Blu-Ray drives
• Floppy drives
• webcams, card readers and other peripherals

You need three commands to work with devcon.

• devcon find
• devcon disable
• devcon enable

Start by downloading devcon from the official Microsoft website. Unpack it to a directory of your choice. It might be a good idea to put it into a directory that is listed in the system path of the operating system, e.g. /system32.

Open the Windows command line with [Windows R], [cmd], [enter].

Enter devcon find * to get a listing of all hardware devices. This can be a long list, you can use the following command to find a specific device (the command is case sensitive):

devcon find * | find "computer hardware identifier"

To find all Creative devices one could enter

devcon find * | find "Creative"

The device in the screenshot above would be the Creative Soundblaster X-FI sound card. To disable that sound card one would use the following command

devcon disable PCI\VEN_1102

It is enough to add the unique identifier for the hardware device. Here are some tips to make the most out of the find command:

Find all PCI devices

devcon find * | find "PCI"

Find all USB devices

devcon find * | find "USB"

All that needs to be done now is to collect the unique identifiers for all computer hardware devices that should be turned off at times.

Create a new text document on the computer, name it disable.bat. Right-click it, select edit and add as many devcon disable lines to it as you want.

devcon disable PCI\VEN_1102
devcon disable PCI\VEN_1317
devcon disable USB\VID_1532

Now create a second batch file, name it enable.bat and use the following code (you basically exchange disable with enable)

devcon enable PCI\VEN_1102
devcon enable PCI\VEN_1317
devcon enable USB\VID_1532

That’s a basic script. You could add echo commands to it, combine the two scripts into one and beatify it further. The basic script on the other hand does what it is supposed to do.

The software interface is divided into various tabs and windows that display all kinds of information. The main window display a device tree, device list and drivers and services tab. A selected item will be displayed in detail on the right window. The information are color coded and make use of checkboxes to allow for mass editing and removal of devices and drivers.

The different view modes are interesting for most users. It is possible to display only hidden and detached drivers and devices which makes it easy to analyze and remove those from the computer system. Hovering the mouse over an entry will display a popup with extensive information about that entry.

It is possible to search for specific devices or drivers using the in build search and to print or export the device list to a txt or csv file.

Device Remover is a professional looking software program for the Windows operating system that provides the means to manage device drivers effectively. The download of the setup file on the author’s homepage failed during the test but it was possible to download the portable version without problems.

It is quite easy to check if Windows is still listing old device drivers on the computer system. All that needs to be done is to access the Windows Device Manager. The easiest way to do this is to press [Windows Pause] which will open the System Properties. A click on Hardware > Device Manager will open the device manager.

The first step in there is to enable the display of hidden devices. Hidden devices are all devices that are currently not connected to the computer system. This can be old device drivers or hardware devices that are currently not connected. To enable hidden devices click on View > Show Hidden Devices.

Windows will now display those devices in the list of hardware devices. Now it is time to click through all the hardware categories of the device manager to scan for devices that are not longer in use. This can be computer monitors, input devices like keyboards or mice, video cards and practically any computer hardware that can be replaced.

A right-click on such a device will provide the means to uninstall the device driver from the computer system. The uninstallation should remove the device entry from the device manager. Nothing can go wrong if you happen to uninstall working hardware devices from the system. Windows will either automatically install the new drivers at the next startup or prompt for a driver disk to perform the installation.

Cautious users might want to create a device driver backup before starting the process.

Each device contains information about the manufacturer, OEM name, device type, device model and even the name of the device. It is therefor easy to identify the device and right-click the device to search for drivers for the device or contact the vendor using the program itself.

It would not be a problem however to use a normal search engine to find a driver instead of the build in search. The biggest problem that I see is that a lot of devices are shown and it could be quite complicated to find the correct one that corresponds to the yellow icon in the device manager.

Open the command prompt by pressing Windows + R, typing cmd and hitting enter. Type the following line and hit enter at the end:  set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 ; Once this is done open your device manager from the control panel and enable the option to view hidden devices in the View tab.

This ensures that all hidden devices that have not been removed in the device manager will be listed and you can see if someone else added a external hard drive, usb stick or similar devices to your system. Great way to find out if someone spies on you or copied files from your system while you were not there.

It can be easily countered by removing the device from the device managers list.