Thursday 14 July 2011

Asus Eee PC – Unknown Hardware - Coprocessor VEN_10DE&DEV_0AA3

We have an Asus Eee PC 1201N that we have had here in the shop for a while. When we set it up we searched around for an unknown piece of hardware in the Device Manager and came up blank.

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When we brought up the Hardware ID for the device:

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Coprocessor Properties

PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0AA3&SUBSYS_84021043&REV_B1

Searching for the Device ID string brought up lots and lots of fluff.

Since the device was probably associated with the nVidia ION chipset we downloaded the latest ION driver:

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After downloading and installing the driver the unknown device status remained.

After digging into the results for the device string a bit more we came across a site that wanted us to pay for the supposedly associated download. However, the site did give us a clue:

  • “ . . . for your nVidia MCP79 Coprocessor.”

So, off we went to search out a driver based on the above. It took quite a while to find the needle in the haystack:

That forum post had a link to a Dell driver download. We clicked the Other Versions link see if there was a newer version of the driver which there was:

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The download auto-installed the driver after it completed. We were able to then see that our unknown was now known:

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The ReadMe.TXT file had enough information in it to point us to the generic nVidia download that also contains that driver set:

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NFORCE Driver 15.56 WHQL approved.

Note behind the browser window we can see the various nVidia drivers installed by the Dell version. The nVidia NFORCE download shows the same list plus graphics related drivers so it is quite a bit heavier.

What we needed to do to resolve the unknown hardware after the fact:

  1. Download the newest nVidia ION driver and install it.
  2. Download the newest nVidia NFORCE driver and install it.

A link to nVidia’s Web site:

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Philip

The place to find info on unknown devices is http://www.pcidatabase.com/

take the DEV and VEN number and plug them in and it will tell you what you have.

www.drivereasy.com is pretty good and is free unlike a lot of driver sites.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Thank you for the pointers!

The PCI Database is excellent. Change the _ for a 0x and we find nVidia "0x10DE" and then the nForce 730i SMBus Controller "0x0AA3".

For the Driver Easy utility, it looks really good but with us we already have a driver library that we keep up to date in-house.

So the technician's cost per computer would add up pretty quickly for us with no real time savings in the long run.

Thanks again! :)

Philip

Anonymous said...

Just had the same exact problem. Thanks a lot for posting this

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this useful post