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Customers ask from time to time how they can pull down driver files that they see on the Windows Update site individually without the need to use the Windows Update Agent internally within Windows. This can be done using the Windows Update Catalog site located here: http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/Home.aspx
You can also use the hardware ID for a device to find drivers for that device by searching the Windows Update Catalog by clicking this link. If you did not find device driver in windows Update Catalog, you can search for the Device ID to find the drivers through any search engine. Parts & Accessories. Parts Lookup. Find Parts (Current Product) Parts Lookup. Each type of update might include drivers. On the Select the updates you want to install page, look for updates for your hardware devices, select the check box for each driver that you want to install, and then click OK. There might not be any driver updates available. On the Windows Update page, click Install updates. To find out the graphics card Subsystem Vendor ID and Device ID use Windows® Device Manager. Open Device Manager and expand Display adapters and Microsoft Basic Display Adapter should be visible. Right-click Microsoft Basic Display Adapter and click on Properties. Go to Details tab, select Hardware Ids under Property. To find the device instance ID go to Device Manager –> Right click the unknown device –> Properties –> Details. It will give you a string value which contains the vendor ID and the Device ID. The string is like this: where VEN_1180 is the vendor ID and DEV_0592 is the Device ID. Note down both of them. Oct 29, 2011 How to: Finding drivers by Vendor and Device ID's through Device Manager. -In the Device Manager menu, whichever way you got to it, find the driver that is missing (yellow question mark). -Right click on that driver and go to “Properties” -In the properties menu, click on the “Details” tab. In this Article: Finding Hardware IDs Using Hardware IDs to Find Drivers Community Q&A References If you have hardware in your computer that is not functioning properly and you're not sure what it is or who made it, you can use the device's Hardware ID to identify it.
You can use the site to pull down not only driver files on Windows Update but individual hotfixes as well. For drivers, I have found that there are two methods that are effective. The first is to try to use the manufacturer and model name of the device that you’re looking for. This works a good amount of the time but it will depend on how the driver is actually listed on the Windows Update Catalog as to whether or not you would get a good result. For example, a co-worker of mine was looking for a driver recently for his Belkin wireless NIC. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the device name so searching for this by manufacturer yields the following result:
As you can see from the screencap (hopefully), there are hundreds of drivers listed for Belkin wireless devices. So, what’s a better way to narrow this down? Use the PNP ID for the device. You can find this in the WindowsINFsetupapi.dev.log on Windows Vista and Windows 7 based installations. In this case, the PNP ID was prefixed with USBVID_050D&PID_945A. So, searching for this, we get the following:
So, this narrows the results from hundreds to tens, and we can further eliminate devices based on the OS we’re looking to find information about. Many people don’t even know about the Download Center, let alone that you can utilize the PNP IDs of devices to find the drivers for those devices.
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