“Plug and Play,” I’m sure most of you have heard this before. But for those of you who don’t know what it means, plug and play is a feature that allows a user to add a device and have the computer know it is there without requiring reconfiguration or manual driver installation. A popular example of this is a USB device like your MP3 player.
Let’s say someone gave you a new MP3 player for Christmas, and the box says it’s plug and play. So you expect to plug it into the back of your computer and start transferring songs to it. Now let’s say your computer does not recognize it, what will you do? Let’s defer throwing it against the wall for now and try some basic troubleshooting steps. The three most common ways to troubleshoot for devices like this are:
– Unplug the device and plug it back in.
– Restart your computer (with and without the device).
– See if your previous, similar device still works.
I don’t know about you, but these steps do not seem hard to do. You can always call the technical support hotline, but on holidays? Good luck. If you still feel lucky today, then let’s move on. If the old plug and play MP3 device still works, then it most probably means that your computer has mistaken the new device for the old one. A more formal term is device driver conflict.
So how do we fix this? We need to uninstall the old MP3 device driver and any other drivers that could cause conflict with your new MP3 device. For this, we need the Device Manager. Configuring the Device Manager requires administrator rights. If you don’t have administrator rights, then this may not work. And now for the fun part…
1: Click on “Start” and choose “Run” (Keyboard shortcut is + R)
2: Type “cmd” (without the quotes) and click OK. A new window will show up, that’s the good old DOS command prompt window.
3: Type in “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1” (without the quotes) and press the “Enter” key.
Note that nothing will happen except that you will see the command prompt again. That’s ok.
4: Type in “devmgmt.msc” (without the quotes) and press the “Enter” key. Nothing will happen on the command prompt window, but the Device Manager window will appear. Click the X button to close the command prompt window.
5: Click on “View” and choose “Show hidden devices”. This will display previously installed devices not connected to your computer, otherwise known as “ghosted” devices.
Pause, smile, and congratulate yourself. Now, we are about to get serious.
Be careful. You should note that non-loaded devices, drivers, and services are “grayed” out, but that doesn’t mean you should delete all of them. Only remove items you know you don’t need. Also, be careful that you don’t change too many devices, or you might need to re-activate your Windows installation.
Click on the plus (+) signs to expand the device list. Staying with our example, we can safely uninstall the old MP3 device driver and the other ghosted USB device since we don’t need it.
We can also safely uninstall the “ghosted” unknown devices listed under “Universal Serial Bus controllers”.
When you’re done, just click on the X button to close the Device Manager. Restart your computer, and VOILA! Your computer should now recognize the new MP3 device. If it does not, there are now many other factors to consider; we will cover the details of which in several future articles.
Thank you for reading and enjoy your new MP3 device. Happy listening!
* Originally published on WorldStart January 11, 2008.
