In part one of this series on Troubleshooting Your PC's Hardware, we discussed how to get started determining what could be causing an issue with any devices in your computer system that have stopped working, whether they were working fine before or they are brand new and have yet to work. In that installment, you should have asked yours

elf several questions and used the answers to figure out how to proceed from there. If you answered “yes” to the following question:

1.) Did you just install this device? If so, is this the first time this type of device has ever been installed in your computer?

Then you are in the right spot. In this installment, we will cover the next steps to take if this is a new device you have just installed and have never used in this particular computer system before. There were also two more questions related to this one to answer in Part 1, and that is how you begin to correct the problem. They were:

• Did you install the driver for this device? All new computer hardware components require a device driver to work. A driver is a little program that tells your operating system how to use the device.

If you did not install the driver for this device, then do so now. Drivers for hardware can be found either on the disk that came with the device itself or from the device's manufacturer's website. If that does not solve the problem, move on to the next question:

• Did you check for conflicts in the Device Manager after you installed the device? Even though the device may have appeared to install fine, it could still be having issues getting along with the other devices already installed and working properly on your computer system.

Open up Device Manager and find out if you are experiencing any conflicts. If you see that one is happening, then proceed to the article on how to resolve device conflicts to see if that solves the problem.

If neither action resolves the problem, you should check to see if there are any updated or new drivers on the manufacturer's website that you can try. If that does not correct the issue or one is not available, then try installing the device on another computer system to see if it works. If it does, then there is an issue with your own computer system. If it does not, then you may have picked up a faulty device, which does happen from time to time. Replace the device if possible.