On Intel-based motherboards a fairly common unknown device one may find when looking in the device manager devices list is the “PCI Simple Communication Controller”. Google returns 207,000 results for “PCI Simple Communication Controller” and the top results are littered with different drivers spanning from sound cards, PCI modems, NIC drivers all the way to Intel Chipset drivers. Begging the question, which driver do I need?

Short of hunting down and blindly trying various drivers and or dissembling your computer hoping to find a clue- there is in fact a much safer and quicker way to identify these unknown devices. Every hardware device has a special identifier used by Plug and Play. This identifier can include more than one identifier, such as a vendor ID, device ID, subsystem ID, subsystem vendor ID, or revision ID.

Let's begin:

1. Open Device Manager and proceed to the “Unknown Device”
2. Right-click and choose Properties
3. Navigate to the Details Tab
4. Select “Hardware Ids” in the Property drop-down box
5. Take note of the Value fields:
   
   
   Analyzing the very first line: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_29C4&SUBSYS_5044107B&REV_02
   Yields, vendor ID (VEN_) = 8086 and device ID (DEV_) = 29C4
6. With those two codes in hand proceed to www.pcidatabase.com to identify your hardware
7. Finally, obtain the latest drivers from the manufacturer website for your specific device and Windows Home Server operating system