If things work well you’ll never know the pain of missing drivers; but if you are like most people, including my friend, a missing driver can be a real pain. Thankfully, we are going to show you how to look for missing drivers and fix your problems in just a few minutes.

Last week my friend approached me with a problem; his notebook did not recognize his Sony Handy Cam HDR-SR11.  This meant that he wouldn’t be able to transfer any videos or pictures to his computer and at the thought of losing all his memorable video and photos from his 14 month old camera he called me for help. I knew that he had already tried re-installing his software and tried several ports and cords so my first question was, “Was it working perfectly in your laptop before?” followed up with, “Did you install or uninstall anything in your laptop?” After he answered, “No”, I decided to remote control his computer and look for the problem.

Once I could see his computer the problem became clear very quickly, he was missing drivers for his USB ports, which meant that the camera wouldn’t connect to his computer even though some other items worked fine. The good news is that, after installing appropriate drivers, his camera worked like a charm. Follow the steps below to look for missing drivers on your computer. Checking your drivers is a great place to start if an accessory or part of your computer suddenly stops working after functioning fine.

How to find a missing driver and reinstall:

Step 1: Click on Start and type ‘Computer Management‘ in the search box as shown in the screen shot below.

Step 2:  Once Computer Management menu opens, click on ‘Device Manager‘ on left side menu of computer management window. See the screen shot below.

Step 3: If any drivers is missing the section will be expanded automatically and marked with a little ‘yellow color’ warning symbol. See the screen shot below. By looking into this you could easily figure out what drivers you are missing.

Step 4: Right click on missing drivers component and click on ‘update driver software‘.

Step 5: You should see screen similar to this.

Step 6: There is good chance that you already have drivers in your computer, which means you could click on ‘Browse my computer for driver software‘ option. If you don’[t think you have the drivers on your computer then choose the first option, ‘Search automatically for updated driver software‘, which will try to find the drivers through Windows Update. If you choose to browse your computer keep following these directions.

Step 7: You should see screen like this. Click on 2^nd option ‘Let me pick from a list …..’

Step 8: Next you will see a screen like this where you can pick the device.

Step 9: Select the appropriate drivers and click on Next button.

Step 10: Drivers will be automatically installed on your PC.

Step 11: You will be required to restart your computer before the driver will work properly.

Step 12: After restart check to make sure the drivers was installed successfully. This time it should not show any missing drivers.

Please make sure that you installed correct driver software in case you choose first option to find updated driver software in step 6.

Disclaimer: Screen shot is from my computer. I created the same problem in my laptop to write this tutorial.