Search for drivers for unknown devices in windows

I think you have repeatedly encountered a situation where you could not find drivers for some devices in Windows. In the device manager, these glands proudly referred to as "Unknown Device". I want to show you my method of solving such situations and two stories of its successful application.

I will say right away that I know the Windows platform badly, and therefore the solution to this problem can be much simpler - it is enough to purchase a program that tells you all about the iron stuffing of your computer.

So the first story. Once upon a time I purchased an IrDA-USB adapter to communicate with a Nokia phone and with Windows XP it worked. Time passed, a laptop with Windows Vista appeared, and it was necessary to copy the data from the phone for safekeeping. And then it turned out that the adapter does not work with drivers that came on the disk. On the manufacturer’s website (Tekram), a fresh driver was not found under Vista, but at the same time the adapter worked fine under Linux, which I used.
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Everyone knows that the plastic shell of many devices with the proud logo of the manufacturer in fact hides under a chip, which is used in hundreds of similar devices. Linux does not look at the logo, Linux works with chips, and the output of dmesg and lspci, lsusb clearly shows where to look for drivers.

So, I inserted the adapter into a Linux machine and looked at the output of lsusb:

Bus 007 Device 002: ID 9710:7780 MosChip Semiconductor MS7780 4Mbps Fast IRDA Adapter

In a couple of minutes on the manufacturer’s website I found the required one - a driver for Windows Vista that worked.

The next example is the HP ML110G5 server. HP supports the installation of Windows Server 2003 for this series, and nothing more. At the same time, the servers were taken under a very crooked system that did not start up otherwise than under Windows XP. As you understand, there was no driver on the HP website under Windows XP, and technical support for the second time clearly stated that such a bundle is not supported.

Again, Linux, namely Slax, helped us, lspci brought out the name of the chipset, the drivers for which we successfully downloaded from the Intel site.

In general, Linux successfully helps to work with Windows networks, and these two cases demonstrate only one small possibility of application. For example, it’s more familiar to me to deploy new computers on the network using partimage or dd, since I don’t find it possible to use unlicensed software, and buying Norton Ghost, when I get along fine without it, is a waste of employer's money.

Update: in the comments you can find other solutions to this particular problem.