I’ve been fiddling with a new (used) laptop thats on loan from a friend. Its running Windows ME. A few days back I plugged a Digital Card Reader (for reading off a digital camera memory card) into the USB port and it detected the device and unstalled it smoothly. At the time the camera and its card was unavailable so i disconnected it. Now I want to use it, and when I plug the reader into the USB the computer does nothing. I can’t figure out any way to make it install the hardware if the plug and play function doesn’t work.
Don’t use ME. But since you’ve heard that before and you’re stuck with it, have you tried using the “Add Hardware” feature in the Control Panel? Tried rebooting with the reader attached/unattached? This is kinda the software equivalent of smacking your TV on the top, but it might work.
Well, I’m not sure I’d say installed. It identified the plug and play device. However now it doesn’t and therefore I can’t access the card to read and write from it. There’s no software package involved. The way it should work is that I plug it in, the OS locates the device and installs the drivers for it. then I can access it via windows explorer. Thats the way it works when i plug it into my Windows 2000 desktop.
I tired the “add Hardware” option and it didn’t detect and new devices. I also tried the reboot thing and it acts as if its not even there.
If it installed the first time, you shouldn’t see anything happen next time (it’s already installed). It may not show up as a drive until you insert a card (and some are badly designed in that you can put the card in either way up).
But it sounds like you’re saying that the device still doesn’t show up in device manager after you’ve plugged it in. Does the laptop have another USB port? I had a USB webcam that, after a few driver issues, would only work with program A from USB port 1, and would only work with program B from USB port 2.
Did you read the instruction book? Alot of USB items I got require that you install the software BEFORE you plug anything in.
Also, after plugging something in on the task bar should be a small icon & you must click that icon BEFORE you unplug the item from the port & read what it says. This one is XP.
Look in the system properties for the device. Yellow symbol and all that is not good of course. But even with a normal icon, it could have installed the wrong driver.
If MS-Windows installed the wrong driver, you’ll have to change it there. Select the device, properties, driver, change driver.
This has nothing to do with your question, but technically, plug and play is only a standard for old (E)ISA cards, the kind that you’d find in an old 486/pentium I computer. PCI and the like are plug and play-like, but not plug and play proper.
Useless, but good trivia.
Did you accidently remove your USB ports from System Information?
As I recall (since I don’t actually have a WinME PC, just 98 and XP) ME requires driver installation for most USB devices. Being recognized by the PnP system is fine but that doesn’t make it work. That’s why you have to install the software first, so the correct and complete drivers will be there when PnP does it’s thing. I would suggest reading the manual, installing the software, then hooking up the device. I’d really recommend getting WinXP. It solves all this foolishness.
