Trying to find drivers for unknown hardware.

I followed your instructions, downloaded the program from pci-z & installed the software & rebooted my PC, no change. I tinkered around & found secondary software for it, still no change. 

Other devices > SM Bus Controller code 28 drivers not installed.

Automatic update finds nothing

installed the "Intel(R)_USB_3.0_eXtensible_Host_Controller_Driver_5.0.4.43_v2" from intel

installed https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005621/software/chipset-software.html from intel

Nothing is working. Is there anything else you're aware of that may help?

Serial bus controller Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller SMBus The drivers for this device are not installed. (Code 28) 8086:8C22 103C:1998 Need device installer. Can be rebalanced.

Open Device Manager (click Start, type Device Manager in the Search box, and press Enter).

Each item that lacks a driver will show an error, most likely Code 10 in the "Device Status" box in the device's "Properties" dialog.

If Device Manager doesn't show the actual name of a device, select the "Details" tab of the device's "Properties."

On the Details tab, select "Hardware Ids" from the drop-down list under "Property."  You should see something like one of the screenshots below.

Either use your favorite search engine to search for the PCI Ven/Dev or USB Vid/Pid strings or look them up in the following databases:

PCI devices

https://www.pcilookup.com/

https://pci-ids.ucw.cz/

https://www.pci-z.com/  (detection utility rather than a database lookup)

USB devices

https://www.the-sz.com/products/usbid/

http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids

Both PCI and USB devices

https://devicehunt.com/

I followed your instructions, downloaded the program from pci-z & installed the software & rebooted my PC, no change.

The databases I linked to and the pci-z detection utility only help you identify devices.  I don't know what "change" you expected to happen.  You have to use that information to find out where to go (i.e., which device manufacturer's support site) and which model device(s) you have, so you can then manually search for an appropriate driver.

Actually, by answering your question too literally, I led you astray a bit:  what you should have done from the beginning is to go to the computer's manufacturer's support website, enter your machine's identifying information -- serial number, Dell Service Tag, or specific model identifier -- and get the drivers that way.  Especially for laptops -- you didn't indicate what type of computer you have -- computer manufacturers may modify drivers so that the driver from the device hardware manufacturer may not be the one to get.

Only if the computer manufacturer doesn't supply drivers for your specific machine -- and in that case, you may not be able to find appropriate drivers anywhere -- should you go to the manufacturers of each specific device, use the information you gleaned by using the databases, and download the drivers directly from the device manufacturers.

SM Bus Controller driver is usually part of the motherboard's chipset driver.  You seem to have started looking in the right direction, but that Intel utility that you linked to is only for Windows 10 and a couple of versions of Windows Server.  For whatever reason, you chose to "revert it back to Windows 7."  If the computer you bought originally came with Windows 10, there may not be any Windows 7 drivers for it.  If I were you, I seriously consider reinstalling Windows 10.

Excellent Lem.