Device Manager
When troubleshooting a problem often you will have to go to the device manager in order to see if your hardware is functioning. The device manager has a listing of all the hardware on your computer and if it's working or not.
To get to the device manager you first go to the Control Panel by pressing the Start button on the bottom left and clicking Control Panel. This will bring up the Control Panel screen that will look like the one below.
From this screen you are going to select the option on the bottom left hand side that says Performance and Maintenance. This screen will bring up another screen that looks like the one below.
This screen has several different tasks listed first but in order to find your Device Manager you have to look at the bottom right hand side and click the System icon. When you click the System icon a menu will come up that looks like this
Depending on the system you have yours will look a little different. On this screen you see basic information on your screen. Your operating system, processor speed, and amount of RAM are all displayed on this page. But in order to get to the device manager you need to click the Hardware tab.
This menu is what you will see under the Hardware tab. From this menu you can add hardware, change settings for different devices and set up hardware configurations. What we want to do now is click the Device Manager button so that we can access the Device Manager and see what we have in the system.
Your Device Manager should look similar to this. This is the list of the hardware attached to your computer. From this screen we can see if all of our devices hooked up to the computer are working. If all things are closed and there are no yellow exclamation marks next to any devices then everything is functioning correctly.
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Last Updated: 04/24/2008