You can look for the device under Device Manager. When you see the System Properties sheet, select the Device Manager tab. If Windows doesn’t detect the new card, open Control Panel and double-click the System icon. If this prompting doesn’t happen, it’s the first sign of trouble. It should prompt you to supply a driver for the card.
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Finally, Windows could be misidentifying the card.Īfter you install a new PCI card, Windows should recognize that a new device has been added to the system. Another possible cause is that an ISA card (an older type of expansion card) is holding a resource and not reporting it to the system. For example, the card may be preset at the factory to use resources that are already occupied.
If the computer is smart enough to assign unused or reserved resources to a PCI card, you may wonder why configuration problems exist at all. The system is free to assign any unused resources to the card, rather than being limited to using the resources that are reserved for the card’s slot. However, on many systems, the PCI slots also support Plug and Play. A PC that has PCI slots reserves certain system resources, such as IRQs and memory addresses, for the device that’s plugged into a given PCI slot. The purpose of PCI was to overcome troublesome hardware conflicts that occurred with the older ISA architecture. PCI is the bus architecture that was released at the same time that the original Pentium CPU came out, even though it appeared on some 486 motherboards, as well. Fortunately, you can take some basic steps to correct most PCI problems. Combining this fact with the possibility that the problem could be hardware-related means that some PCI problems can be a real mess to sort out. Have you ever bought a nifty new PCI-based device, only to have difficulty installing it? Although Windows’ Plug and Play code has improved over the years, it’s still not perfect. Diagnosing problems with stubborn PCI cardsīrien Posey reveals basic steps that you can take to correct most PCI problems.