Installing hardware drivers - tips for newbies

The Device Manager (Control Panel, System, tab Hardware, button Device Manager) shows you all the detected and installed hardware and hardware drivers. The unrecognized hardware is shown as a yellow question mark, which indicates you still have to install some drivers to get it to work. Probably you received a special CD-ROM or floppy disk from the manufacturer, which you have to use to install the drivers for the unrecognized hardware. If you don't have the CD-ROM (anymore), you can almost always download the hardware drivers from the manufacturers website.

Below you see all installed hardware within the Device Manager, as you can see there are no yellow question marks anymore:
Nowadays, most hardware is recognized by Windows. If this is not the case, the installation files from CD-ROM (or downloaded from the manufacturers website) give a problem free installation. Most times, if you follow the installation instructions on a clean Windows setup, there won't be any problem.

If the installation did give an error, the best you can do is to delete the new hardware drivers from the Device Manager. Just delete the hardware entry (DEL-key). After a reboot of your computer, the hardware will be detected again, which enables you to reinstall the hardware drivers.