Windows 7: Best Program to Find Drivers

Whats the best program to find driver automatically

Personal opinion, and others may disagree, but I wouldn't rely on any third party programs to find drivers. Many times the drivers they recommend are either outdated or haven't been optimized for a particular computer. The same can also happen using Windows Updates recommended driver downloads (it happened to me on two different occasions.)

I'd go to the computer manufacturer's website. The drivers they offer have been optimized specifically for the various computers they sell. My second choice would be to use the hardware manufacturer's website. But even that can cause problems.

Quick true story. Back in March 2012, Windows Updates told me there was a new Realtek driver for my computer. I went to the Realtek website and confirmed the driver was available. Immediately after installing the new driver I started getting BSODs. I rolled back to the previous driver version and everything worked again. I contacted Realtek and they said when they offer a new driver version, each computer manufacturer is free to modify that driver for their specific computers. If the computer manufacturer has not yet modified the driver, the newest version may not work. So even the newest may not be the best. Last week Sony finally offered that Realtek driver through the Vaio update site. It's working just fine now that they've worked their magic on it.

Moral of the story: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Thank you I decided to just go to the manufactures website but I still need help because I'm still missing 2 drivers and they don't say why drivers they are they come up as unknown how can I find out what they are

The easiest way to find out what they are is to try every function of the computer and determine what isn't working correctly. The other option is to go to Device Manager (you can do this from the start menu search bar). Go to the unknown device, right-click and select properties. Go to the details tab, and on the drop down box, select hardware IDs. You should see 1 or 2 hardware IDs listed. You can then Google search these IDs to try to find out what they are, or if you prefer, you can tell us exactly what the IDs are, and we can try to find out for you.

What computer hardware do you have? Is this a laptop or a desktop?

i have a laptop and which hardware do you mean? and the IDs are

ACP\INT33A0
*INT33A0

Can you please confirm if the above hardware IDs are correct. I haven't found anything for ACP\INT33A0 yet, but I did find something for ACPI\INT33A0. Is realted to the Intel Smart Connect Technology. The driver can be gotten from here: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Deta...indows+7++*eng

If it is ACP\INT33A0, I will keep searching.

you are correct lol i misspelled it that you
and this one too universal serial bus(USB) controller

Hi there
Forget third party programs --usually they are the dreaded SNEAKWARE or SUCKERWARE--particularly things like DriverMax.

You get suckered into believing that these programs can actually find something -- and if they have it in their database (even though these drivers are public domain software) you will have to "pay a fee" to access that part of the site etc etc --seen it so many times before.

Just get the details of the sriver you can't find via Device manager --properties --driver details

You'll get something like PCI&VEN---- etc.

Copy and paste into a google search -- this should yield results of who the manaufacturere is -then go to the site. There are some data bases as well which contain a list of Vendor Id's too.


Here's a good start. (Article is quite old but still valid for the most part).

How To Find Unknown Device Drivers By Their Vendor & Device ID

cheers
jimbo

Fill out your system specs so we know what laptop you have. We can research the hardware.