Question: It came to me out of curiosity, "Could one monitor whatever is being transfered from modem/router to devices using the internet"? 

So, I have a laptop at home and an iPad. Could I simply *see* what these devices *download* (i.e. surfing, videos, pictures, whatever..) from the internet? Im guessing this would be a problem regarding privacy? But, could it be set up for your own device or own home network or some other situation?

Answer: 
You want to get the PCI vendor and product (device) ID numbers from Device Manager, and do a search on that. Sometimes hardware is too esoteric for even this to work, but it's helpful in most cases.

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3eR81.png)

"8086" is Intel, by the way.

This is assuming it's a PCI device.
USB devices have a vendor and device ID as well.

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/c1ru5.png)

There's a couple of other buses such as SMBus and UMBus. Some hardware is reported by ACPI or not on a bus - things like this may not be possible to identify. Keep in mind it's possible some "devices" in Device Manager are not real devices at all, such as VPN adapters and most of the Non Plug and Play devices.

If you have a Linux boot disk handy, you can boot it up and then execute the `lspci` and `lsusb` commands which usually give you pretty good information.
Try this website, it might be helpful:

<http://pcidatabase.com/>

With the device and vendor ID you should be able to find a driver.