The Hungry Hacker's Explanation of Everything

Spike on IRC was commenting about how much of a pain in the arse it is to track down drivers for unknown hardware on Windows, and how easy it is under Linux using lspci. I sat and thought about it – lspci can’t possibly pluck hardware strings from nowhere, there has to be some sort of database… and there is, and best of all there’s a web-based front end to it.

So here’s how to do it yourself in a few easy steps… first, right-click My Computer and choose properties. Then, go to the Hardware tab, and pick Device Manager.

Navigate to your unknown device, double-click it and then pick the Details tab. Find the Hardware Ids entry, and look for the most detailed entry. My shitty SiS network adaptor’s is “PCI\VEN_1039&DEV_0900“.

Navigate to the PCI Devices database in a browser on an internet-connected computer. In my case, I’m looking for vendor ID 1039, so I’ll click “1″ and scroll down… and I’ll find the Vendor “Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]“, which is to be expected. Click into the Vendor entry and look for the Device ID.

That should hopefully give you the correct Google-snacks to track down a driver for the hardware.