Friday, November 4, 2011

Windows 7 and manual driver installs

Another edition of recording a solution I'll need sometime in the future  but will never remember where I wrote it down.

We've rolled out Windows 7 (64bit) on Library PCs.  A book return workstation stopped working with it's 3M 943 Bookcheck unit. We got a hold of the 64 bit version of the software (yay) and were told it should prompt us to locate the 64 bit driver when we connected the unit. It didn't.

No wuckers, I thought, I'll install the driver manually. But if you locate the device from Devices and Printers, right-click, select Properties, click the Hardware tab, click the Properties button, click the Drivers tab, all the options for manually updating or installing the driver are greyed out - the only option is allowing Windows Update to find the driver (it couldn't).

Much hair ripping out.

Then I tried right-clicking on Computer, selecting Manage, select Device Manager, right click on the device, select the Driver tab and lo and behold exactly the same window - but with all the options available.


Stupid Windows.  3M and AWA support were great.