PC Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

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Hack 83 Install the Driver Before You Install the Hardware

How not to "outsmart" Plug and Play and the Windows Add New Hardware wizard.

As brilliant and helpful as the concept and implementation of Plug and Play [Hack #18] has been, it is possible to confound it. This hack is almost too simple, and all too easily overlooked: install the drivers provided with your devices before you connect the device to your computer.

Why? As you probably know, when you connect a new device to your PC, Windows starts its Add New Hardware wizard and usually prompts you to provide the location of the drivers for the device. When the wizard runs, you have three choices: locate the disk or download location for the driver and let the wizard continue to install the driver and enable the device; let the wizard try to find new the driver on its own and possibly fail; or cancel the installation.

If you locate the driver and it installs, all is well. If the wizard cannot find a driver, it disables the device, remembers that the device is unconfigured, and marks it as an Unknown Device in Windows Device Manager. This is a fairly common situation for many USB devices, especially among anxious users who expect Plug and Play to "know all" and connect their devices, without following instructions. Windows needs to have the driver information available so it can detect the device by name and associate it with the right driver.

If you don't have the driver immediately handy but know you'll find it eventually, go back one step and cancel the wizard. Do not let the wizard mark the device as unknown or it will be dumped in "unknown device purgatory."

Once the device is remembered as being "unknown," no further attempts to install a driver will be made no matter how many times you disconnect the device, restart it, or reconnect it. The only way to get out of this condition is to uninstall the device using the Device Manager, as follows:

Figure 8-8. Windows marks devices that have conflicts with an exclamation point in a yellow dot

Very often you can "scrounge" through Windows device listings and find an acceptable alternative or generic driver to get you going, albeit with the loss of some features. A good example is the installation of a typical HP LaserJet printer. Most LaserJet printers respond to the same Printer Control Language (PCL) command set, so you can get away with picking the older LaserJet 4 driver to print to a new LaserJet 4100. Printers that use the Adobe PostScript (PS) language will print with almost any generic or specific PostScript driver.

As simplistic as it sounds, taking a minute to read and follow the instructions will save you several minutes, hours, or days of frustration as you try to figure out how to resolve the problem. Install the drivers first and connect the device afterwards.

This type of problem has been the curse of PCs and technology advances for years, whether or not the technology is ISA, SCSI, Plug and Play, PCI, USB, or AGP. Most add-on devices are created and sold sometime after the hardware and operating system have been sold and installed, so there is no way Windows could have a driver for the device or know it existed beforehand. Unfortunately, Windows Update does not support enough driver updates to be of much help here, so you are dependent on what ships in the box and the content of vendors' web sites to keep your hardware up to date.

If you believe you need an updated driver for a hardware device visit the manufacturers' web sites for the latest versions that may or may not ever make it into the Windows Update service. In order for Windows Update to provide device drivers, the manufacturer of the device must submit their drivers to a lab for extensive testing to get Microsoft certification, and then to Microsoft for inclusion in Windows Update—an expensive and time-consuming process. You are much more likely to get the latest, greatest, and most stable driver directly from the manufacturer.

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