Windows 7 has excellent support for most newer
devices, and most major hardware vendors have taken steps to update
their devices and drivers to run properly with Windows 7. If you use
only recent, Plug and Play–compliant devices that qualify for the
Designed for Windows 7 logo, you should have a trouble-free computing
experience (at least from a hardware perspective). Of course, putting trouble-free and computing
next to each other is just asking for trouble. Hardware is not
foolproof; far from it. Things still can, and will, go wrong, and, when
they do, you’ll need to perform some kind of troubleshooting. (Assuming,
of course, that the device doesn’t have a physical fault that requires a
trip to the repair shop.) Fortunately, Windows 7 also has some handy
tools to help you both identify and rectify hardware ills.
Troubleshooting with Device Manager
Device
Manager not only provides you with a comprehensive summary of your
system’s hardware data, it also doubles as a decent troubleshooting
tool. To see what I mean, check out the Device Manager tab shown in Figure 1.
See how the icon for the Fingerprint Sensor device has an exclamation
mark superimposed on it? This tells you that there’s a problem with the
device.
If you examine the device’s properties, as shown in Figure 2, the Device Status area tells you a bit more about what’s wrong. As you can see in Figure 22.6,
the problem here is that the device drivers aren’t installed. Device
Manager usually offers a suggested remedy (such as the Update Driver
button shown in Figure 22.6).
Device Manager uses three different icons to give you an indication of the device’s current status:
A black exclamation mark (!) on a yellow field tells you that there’s a problem with the device.
A red X tells you that the device is disabled or missing.
A blue i
on a white field tells you that the device’s Use Automatic Settings
check box (on the Resources tab) is deactivated and that at least one of
the device’s resources was selected manually. Note that the device
might be working just fine, so this icon doesn’t indicate a problem. If
the device isn’t working properly, however, the manual setting might be
the cause. (For example, the device might have a DIP switch or jumper
set to a different resource.)
If
your system flags a device, but you don’t notice any problems, you can
usually get away with just ignoring the flag. I’ve seen lots of systems
that run perfectly well with flagged devices, so this falls under the
“If it ain’t broke...” school of troubleshooting. The danger here is
that tweaking your system to try and get rid of the flag can cause
other—usually more serious—problems.
