If you’re trying find out information about specific drivers but are uncertain of what sound card your computer holds, this guide will get you finding what you‘re looking for in no time.
Drivers
Information about all of your computer’s drivers is contained within one handy menu. So, if you’re looking for other drivers such as video card, optical drives or monitors, this tutorial can still very much apply.
Step 1
You will want to access your Control Panel from the Start menu. From there you will want the first option: System and Maintenance.
From there, scroll down until you find Device Manager. Click on that. A new window will appear giving you a display of all active drivers currently running on your computer.
Step 2
The drivers are listed alphabetically, so the option you will want to find is Sound, video and game controllers. Expand the list by clicking the + icon to the left of it. (You can collapse the list again by clicking on the - icon.)
From there, you will get a list of the available sound cards on your computer. You may see more than one on the list. You should also see the name of the driver as well as its manufacturer. If it does not give any more than a vague description, (i.e. “High Definition Sound Card), you can double-click on it to open a menu of how to interact with it and find more information about it.
Step 3
You will want to choose the second tab: Driver. From there, you can find information about the available driver, as well as some other options. You can check to see if there are updates available or even rollback to a previous driver if there are compatibility issues. If this device is conflicting with other sound cards, you can either disable it or uninstall it entirely. Only disable or uninstall it if absolutely necessary. Otherwise, you may not get any sound from your computer at all. Reinstalling drivers is not difficult, but it just creates extra work. This is especially true if you have to track that particular driver down.
You can apply the same method to other drivers you have. If you are trying to see if there are more up to date drivers for other devices (video cards, monitors, processors, or other hardware you have connected to your computer), the same process applies.