You can also use the hardware ID for a device to find drivers for that device by searching the Windows Update Catalog at http://catalog.update.microsoft.com.
Searching for the VEN and DEV portions of that hardware ID will often reveal additional drivers that work with your device even in instances where those drivers don’t show up in a normal Windows Update scan.
The reason for this is that many different hardware vendors will sometimes use the same chipset in their device. It is not uncommon to see 7 or 8 different network card vendors or hardware vendors use the same network chipset in their device. Because the chipset is mostly the same (though occasionally with some modifications) a driver that will work in one device stands a good chance of working with many of the other devices that use the same chipset.
A hardware ID is typically in the form of <BUS>\<VENDOR ID>&<Device ID>&<Additional IDs>.
The Vendor ID is indicated by the four characters after VEN_.
The Device ID is indicated by the four characters after DEV_.
In most cases, the VEN and DEV IDs will be defined by the chipset manufacturer, so we would see those different network cards in the example above would all likely have the same VEN and DEV parts in their hardware ID. The portion of the hardware ID that is used to differentiate the different network cards that use the same chipset from each other will be the additional fields such as SUBSYS and REV. These are not normally important for our purposes, though Windows Update will use those parts when determining whether or not it has an appropriate driver. Use a less specific driver may not always expose customizations or changes made to the hardware by the hardware vendor, in the majority of cases the other driver will work.
Knowing the VEN and DEV portions of the hardware ID, we can search on just that portion of the string in the Windows Update Catalog and see other drivers that are available for that chipset.
For example, let’s looks at a computer that has a Gigabyte GBB36X storage controller which shows up as Other Device in Device Manager. The driver for this device is not included inbox with Windows. If we looked for and did not find the driver on the Gigabyte Support website, we could search for that controller by its shortened hardware ID.
Device Manager shows that the hardware ID for the Gigabyte GBB36X is:
PCI\VEN_197B&DEV_2363&SUBSYS_B0001458&REV_02
If we remove everything after the DEV part, we are left with a hardware ID that looks like:
PCI\VEN_197B&DEV_2363
By searching for the shortened hardware ID on the Windows Update catalog, we are able to find alternate drivers that work with our storage controller.
By searching on the shortened hardware ID, we find 4 results for possible drivers we can use. They are all from JMicron Technology Corp., which happens to be the chipset manufacturer for our Gigabyte storage controller. The 4 results we see are 32-bit and 64-bit drivers for both Windows Vista and Windows 7.
In many cases, if a Windows 7 driver is not available, the Windows Vista driver will work. You will need to make sure that the driver you select is appropriate for your architecture, meaning you need to select a 32-bit driver if you have 32-bit Windows installed, and you need to select a 64-bit driver if you have 64-bit Windows installed.
You can find the architecture by clicking the driver and looking at the architecture field of the window that appears.
Once you’ve identified the appropriate driver architecture and OS version, you can download the driver, extract it from the CAB file, and install it using the Update Drive Software wizard in Device Manager
Note:- If you did not find device driver in windows Update Catalog, you can Google up the Device ID to find the drives.
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