Washington - Device drivers: without them, your computer is just a collection of parts. With them, your operating system can talk to your scanner, Webcam, printer, camera, cell phone, and many other components both inside and outside of your PC. In a perfect world, you would never have to give device drivers a second thought. But computers are far from perfect. That's why problems with device drivers are fairly common. Read on for some solutions. Q: When I plug something new into my computer, Windows offers to go online to find a device driver for it. But Windows never succeeds. Am I doing something wrong?
A: No. You are probably referring to the Windows Hardware Update wizard or the Found New Hardware wizard, which appears when you plug in something new to your computer. Both wizards offer to "connect to Windows Update to search for software," but the effort typically fails, especially if you are using Windows XP or Windows Vista.
This feature that rarely works is no secret to Microsoft, which has greatly improved this automatic driver search capability in Windows 7. Unfortunately, to get this working, you'll have to wait for Windows 7 to arrive on store shelves. Until that time, you'll have to have the sought-after driver on a disk or CD.
Q: How can I tell if my Windows computer is missing any drivers?
A: Generally if everything you typically plug in to your computer is recognised and working fine, then you probably have no missing drivers.
But to be sure, you can open the Windows Device Manager. In XP, open the Control Panel and double-click System. From the resulting dialog box, select the Hardware tab, and then click Device Manager. From Vista and Windows 7, just open the Start menu, type Device Manager, and then click the Device Manager entry that appears.
In the Device Manager, if you see a yellow question mark next to anything, that means you are missing a driver for that device. You can right-click the device entry to get a pop-up that will allow you either to update the driver, disable the device, or uninstall it. Click Update Driver if you downloaded an appropriate driver or if you have a driver installation CD.
Q: The Windows Device manager tells me I'm missing several drivers. One of them is SM Bus Controller. I have no idea what this is. Can you help?
A: The SM Bus Controller is part of the chipset on your motherboard. You should have received an installation disk for the chipset with the computer or with your motherboard.
Often the best way to find out about a device with a question mark next to it in Device Manager is to do a search for it online. Chances are good that if you have experienced difficul
