How to Find Tech Support Information

Locate computer drivers, manuals, & tech support phone numbers

Tech support troubleshooting on computer

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by Tim Fisher
Tim Fisher has 30+ years' professional technology support experience. He writes troubleshooting content and is the General Manager of Lifewire.
Updated February 21, 2019

Nearly every hardware manufacturer and software maker on earth provides some kind of online technical support and product information for the products they sell.

You'll need to find a hardware company's technical support information if you plan on downloading drivers from them, calling them for support, downloading a manual, or researching a problem with their hardware or software.

If you need technical support for a device but you're not sure who made it, you'll need to identify the hardware before following these instructions.

Follow these easy steps to find your hardware manufacturer's technical support information online:

How to Find Tech Support Information

Time Required: Finding tech support information for your hardware and software is usually very easy and typically takes less than 10 minutes.

  1. Browse our directory of manufacturer support sites or use the search bar at the top of this page.

    This is a growing and constantly updated list of technical support contact information for most major computer hardware manufacturers.

  2. If you weren't able to find the technical support information you were looking for in the company directory, searching for the manufacturer from a major search engine like Google or Bing is your next best option.

    For example, let's say you were looking for technical support information for the hardware company AOpen. Some great search terms to find support information for AOpen might be aopen support, aopen drivers, or aopen technical support.

    Some smaller companies may not have dedicated self-help areas like bigger companies do but they often have contact information for telephone-based support. If you think this might be the case, try searching strictly for the company name and then do your best to locate this information on their website.

    If you do find technical support information for a company via a search engine, please let us know what you find so we can update our list from Step 1 above.

  3. At this point, if you haven't found a manufacturer's technical support website after searching through our list, as well as pages of search engine results, it's very likely that the company is out of business or doesn't provide support online.

    If you're looking for a telephone number, email address, or other direct technical support information, then you're probably just out of luck.

    If you're looking to download drivers for this hardware, you may still be able to locate them. See our list of driver download sources for some alternative ideas if you can't find the manufacturer website.

    You might also want to try what's called a driver updater tool. This is a dedicated program that scans your computer's installed hardware and checks the driver version installed against a database of the latest drivers available, somewhat automating the task. See our Free Driver Updater Tools list for the best ones available.

  4. Finally, we always recommend that you seek out support elsewhere on the Internet, even if it's not directly from the company that made your hardware. Of course, you always have the option of getting "real world" support as well, maybe from a friend, a computer repair shop, or even an online "fix it" outfit. See How Do I Get My Computer Fixed? for your full set of options.