Lee,

   I think that looking at the hardware is not really the right idea.
Windows interacts with hardware through an abstraction layer.  WMI interacts
with the hardware through this abstraction layer.  It basically is a
normalized way of accessing information in a system.

   That being said, if your system supports the hardware, then you should
be able to get information about it through WMI (WMI will just access the
appropriate APIs that you would access normally).

   Hope this helps.