Using Windows Troubleshooting (part 3)

4. Real-World Troubleshooting: What Happens When Something Goes Wrong

Proactively browsing around the available troubleshooters can certainly be instructive, but face it, you're probably not going to spend too much time in there unless something really does go wrong. So what does Windows do in a time of crisis?

To test this, consider what happens when you install Windows 7 for the first time. During Setup, Windows 7 installs as many drivers as it can in a bid to give you a fully working system. But the first thing that happens when you boot into your new desktop is that Windows Update starts and then begins downloading updates. And more often than not, it finds a number of additional drivers that are needed to complete your install. Once you get those installed, you should be all set.

But sometimes you're not. For whatever reason, some PCs simply include a number of devices, often low-level chipset-type devices, that refuse an easy driver fix. These issues often don't result in any perceptible usability issues, and you'd have to manually load Device Manager to even notice that a device or two is unaccounted for. But even if you don't do this, Windows knows. And in the background, periodically, the Windows Troubleshooting platform will fire up, examine the issue, and try to find a fix.

When Troubleshooting does find a fix, it alerts you via the Action Center notification icon, as we discussed previously. Click this icon once and, as you can see in Figure 9, it could eventually recommend that you solve a problem, in this case for a chipset driver that never properly installed.

Figure 9. Eureka! Windows 7 has solved a problem.

Click the message window and Action Center will load the message details, as shown in Figure 10. Here, it recommends downloading a driver directly from the manufacturer, extracting it, and then installing it.

When you click the various links on this Message Details window, the text will expand to provide more information. Under the first link, Download the driver installation file, you will discover a direct link to download the correct driver. The second link provides instructions for extracting the ZIP file that contains the driver. The third link provides a roundabout explanation for why Windows 7 was unable to find this driver automatically: it's actually for an older version of Windows. And the troubleshooter provides information on running the driver setup routine in compatibility mode in order to ensure it works properly, as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 10. Here's what you need to do to make things right.

Figure 11. In order to get the driver installed, we're going to have to do a little shimming.

Once this process is complete, you can return to Device Manager to ensure that the previous missing driver is now accounted for. Then the Action Center message window should quickly return to its default state, as shown in Figure 12. Mission accomplished.

Figure 12. And we're done.