Troubleshooting Device Problems

Windows Home Server has good support for most newer devices, and it’s likely that most major hardware vendors will take steps (eventually) to update their devices and drivers to run properly with Windows Home Server. If you use only recent, Plug and Play-compliant devices that are compatible with either Windows Home Server or Windows Server 2003, you should have a trouble-free computing experience (at least from a hardware perspective). Of course, putting trouble-free and computing next to each other is just asking for trouble. Hardware is not foolproof—far from it. Things still can, and will, go wrong, and, when they do, you’ll need to perform some kind of troubleshooting. (That’s assuming, of course, that the device doesn’t have a physical fault that requires a trip to the repair shop.) Fortunately, Windows Home Server also has some handy tools to help you both identify and rectify hardware ills.

Troubleshooting with Device Manager

Windows Home Server stores all its hardware data in the Registry, but it provides Device Manager to give you a graphical view of the devices on your system. To display Device Manager, first use either of the following techniques: