"98 Guy" wrote in message ...
Note that I cut 2 of the original 5 newsgroups from this reply.
Hopefully the OP will be reading one of the remaining 3 groups.

wrote:

I started a "computer recycling project" in my church.

Essentially what I am looking for is a utility that can "scan"
all the pci cards, be it soundcard, video card, or whatever,
and give me their make and/or model number.

http://www.zhangduo.com/unknowndeviceidentifier.html


Another quite similar utility, that I have used for some time, is "Unknown Devices
1.2", available he
http://www.halfdone.org/ukd/
and
http://www.speakeasy.org/~halfdone/
and
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Unknown_Devices_d3908.html



http://www.windrivers.com/

http://www.drivermagician.com/

http://www.softwarepatch.com/

http://freescan.driverguide.com/

http://driveragent.com/

http://tinyurl.com/3ygotp

Another thing is that the computers we got are all ANCIENT
computers, and sometimes so ancient that the manufacturers
no longer exist.

The only versions of Windows you should be installing on those system
will either be Windows-98se, or Windows XP-SP2. Windows 98-se is a
more logical choice in your case, since you most likely are dealing
with systems with slow/old CPU's and meager amounts of RAM, not to
mention that you would need to obtain a licence for XP (but you can
install Windows-98se with complete impunity regardless of what others
here think of that).


Win98SE does not require activation the way XP and newer do, but installing multiple
systems with one license *is* a violation of the licensing agreement. True, no one
at MS is going to send out the "cyber-police" at this point in time.....indeed, MS
has no way to even tell if 98 has been installed on multiple machines with one
license. Being a church-related project, the OP may want to consider the legal
aspect. Nuff said on that.....


That said, Windows 98 should be relatively complete as far as having
drivers for motherboards and hardware that was available back in 1998
and probably as far back as 1995. Anything more recent than 1998
should be available on the net (motherboard, video, network cards,
modems, etc).

I wouldn't waste my time in your case trying to find drivers for sound
cards, SCSI or other "non-standard" storage devices, or video cards
made before 1998. Most likely the recipients of your computers will
not make use of devices like those.

I would think a working sound card from any era would be an item the endusers would
want.


You, and the recipients of the systems you are building, will probably
not be satisfied with the use of such old hardware, say anything with
less than a Pentium-II CPU. The computing experience will be
troublesome and frustrating and not worth the effort. You shouldn't
have a problem finding tons of relatively recent hardware - unless
there are other larger recyclers in your area that are obtaining more
modern surplus hardware to either build into systems - or to ship
overseas and melt them down for their base metals.
--
Glen Ventura, MS MVP Shell/User, A+
http://dts-l.org/
http://dts-l.org/goodpost.htm