A device driver is a small software that tells the operating system like Windows about how to interface with the hardware. For example, the device driver for your printer tells Windows the correct way of sending instructions to it. Without the correct device driver, a piece of hardware may not work at all and show up as unrecognized device in Windows. Even after installing all the device drivers in Windows, there are some of the hardware modules that stay without any proper device drivers for them. Such unknown devices can be put to work easily by installing proper device drivers for them.
You can investigate such unknown devices in Windows using an open-source software called “Unknown Devices”. This small and portable program can scan your Windows computer for all the hardware that does not have any device drivers installed for them. As soon as you launch this program, it starts to download the hardware database from the internet. This takes about 30 seconds to complete.
Immediately following the database update, you are shown a list of all the hardware connected to your Windows PC that lacks any device drivers. You can expand the tree controls and check all the unknown devices that it finds. For each of the such device, it will shown you a hardware ID and vendor ID number.
You can use these vendor ID and hardware ID to find more about the devices on websites like PCIDatabase, or you can just google for them. This way, if you are lucky, you will be able to find some of the device drivers and make your PC run much more smoothly.
Conclusion: Although Unknown Devices is a very simple and plain application, it can still give you some tidbits of information that could help you find more about the unrecognized devices on your Windows computer.
You can download Unknown Devices from https://sourceforge.net/projects/unknowndevices/.