In this case I've got two missing drivers. The first, "Multimedia Audio Controller" is fairly easy, that's a missing sound card driver. But what is an "SM Bus Controller?" Where do I look for that driver? I've even seen "Unknown PCI Device" before. How do you look for a driver for a device that you don't even know what it is?
If the machine has a major manufacture (Dell, HP, etc.) then you've probably been to their page to download drivers. But what if the machine isn't from a major manufacture, of even if it is what if you can't find the driver, then what? Microsoft Windows update can be a useful resource. Their database contains a lot of drivers and will automatically detect and install. However, their system has one fundamental flaw. Microsoft charges vendors a fee to validate and host drivers for them. As I understand it, this fee is fairly significant too. As a result, many vendors drivers are not available on Windows Update.
If you Google things like "driver downloads" you'll probably find several web sites that have large collections of drivers. All these sites that I've found are very sketchy. At a minimum they all require you to register and I hate giving out my information - just another way to get spammed. Many of them require you to download and install a program of theirs which scans your system and reports missing drivers. I don't like installing questionable programs, who knows all what it's installing. And what's worst, some of these sites if you do go through all these hoops and they do contain your missing driver, they make you pay a monthly fee to be able to download the driver in question. My recommendation is unless a site allows you to download a driver without signing up or downloading a program to avoid these sites altogether.
But that brings up back to the original problem, how do we find the driver for our hardware? When I continue this series tomorrow I'll talk about identifying the hardware in question.
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