I recently did a clean install of Windows 7 on my computer, downloaded all the drivers from the manufacturer’s website, and thought everything was fine. I accidentally went into Device Manager and noticed that the problem was with the underlying system device.
In fact, there have been several errors in the underlying system device driver, all with question marks. I was surprised because I thought I had downloaded important system drivers like graphics card, touchpad, network adapter, etc.
Unfortunately, I haven’t downloaded all the drivers. Eventually I figured out what the problem was and no longer got the error in Device Manager. In this article, I will show you how to fix the driver problem on Windows.
Despite the fact that I installed most of the drivers, I did not install some of them, considering that they are not needed. The base system device is usually associated with one of three pieces of hardware: a chipset, Bluetooth, or an SD card reader.
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Go to the manufacturer’s website and find drivers for your specific model. Be sure to download the chipset drivers and install the latest version. Also, look for Bluetooth drivers and SD card readers if you have them on your system.
Alternatively, you can find out which driver is needed by looking for the hardware IDs for any device that shows up as unknown or with a question mark in Device Manager. To do this, double-click the base system device and select Details. Then click on “Hardware IDs” in the dropdown list.
It should look something like this:
PCI VEN_15AD & DEV_0405 & SUBSYS_040515AD & REV_00 PCI VEN_15AD & DEV_0405 & SUBSYS_040515AD PCI VEN_15AD & DEV_0405 & CC_030000 PCI VEN_040 & DEV_030000 & VEN_040 & DEV_030000
You can now go to a site like the PC ID Repository and search through a list of them using Vendor ID and Developer ID. Where are these numbers? The part after VEN_ is the vendor ID. The first line above is 15 AD. The device ID is the part after DEV_, which in the above case is 0405.
I clicked on 1 and then searched for 15ad and got the following results:
As seen above, this is related to VMware. If you click on the link, you will see the device numbers. 0405 is listed at the top as an SVGA adapter, that is, a video card.
Since I installed Windows on a virtual machine, VMware is the vendor. The device is the graphics card installed on my host computer. Pretty neat, huh? The next time you see a big question mark or “Unknown device” in Device Manager, you can now pinpoint exactly what hardware the driver is missing.
For now, just go through all the basic system devices listed here and determine which driver you need to load. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to leave comments. Enjoy!
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