Adding new Hardware 2

The state of the Hardware

When a piece of hardware stops running correctly we can check its state through the information that Windows provides us. Sometimes the piece of hardware can work properly from a mechanical point of view but its driver is not well installed, thus not allowing the hardware to function properly.

To see the state of the hardware of our system, select the Start button and click on Control Panel and then click on Performance and maintenance. You will see this screen. Click on See basic information about your computer.

The System properties window will appear with the General tab selected. On this tab we can see generic information about our system, such as what processor is installed, etc. Click on Hardware to view this screen. Now click on Device manager. which will take us to the next screen.

On this screen the Device manager shows us a list with all of the hardware installed on our computer. This list contains the hardware by type. For example, in Screen adaptors we have information on the graphics card, in Network adaptors we will find information on the network cards installed. To see the content of each type click on the + on the left. For example, we have opened the content of Network adapters hardware and it shows us two network cards, one of them do no work correctly. The most interesting thing about this list is that it shows us the state of each piece of hardware.. If there were an error with any hardware, a yellow question mark would appear to the right of it or a red cross as you can see. When a piece of hardware is not working properly we can try to fix it from this list. To do this double-click on the piece of hardware that is not working and the window shown on the next page will appear.

This is the Properties screen for the HP psc 1200 series scanner.

We are in the General section, which gives us general information about the camera.

In this case we can see that the hardware is working properly, but in the event it were not, we could click on Troubleshoot... and this would take us to the Help center and technical support window where we can launch a scan to find the problem.

Nonetheless, when a piece of hardware is not working properly it is very probable that it is due to some drivers installed improperly or not updated.

We should therefore click on Driver tab to try to fix the problem ourselves.

On this screen we have the basic information on the driver and the button Driver Details... which will show us more information.

As we mentioned before, it is possible that the problem will be solved if we install a more recent driver. To do this click on Update Driver... this will launch an assistant similar to the ones we have talked about.

If the problem is still not solved by this point we can uninstall the driver and reinstall it. To do this click on Uninstall. Even though many times we cannot explain why uninstalling and reinstalling solves some problems.

Click here to go back