The beauty of firmware is that if you purchase a peripheral and the manufacturer
subsequently improves the product, you can usually update the firmware
to upgrade the product.
When a device isn??™t working or a driver won??™t install, go to the hardware
manufacturer??™s web site and look for a firmware update. Since there??™s no
standard method of upgrading firmware, be sure to get the firmware upgrade
utility from the web site as well.
Dealing with Drivers and Other Tales of Hardware Troubleshooting | 317
Troubleshooting
What to do when Windows can??™t find a driver
There??™s a bug in Windows Vista that makes it seem like it has amnesia. You
plug in a device??”even one you??™ve used before??”and after quite a long time
of thinking about it, Vista complains that it can??™t find the driver. This is particularly
disconcerting when it??™s a common device like a hard disk or a USB
card reader. Fortunately, it??™s fairly easy to fix.
The problem is that Vista maintains a cache of its driver locations, and for
reasons that aren??™t entirely clear, Vista won??™t abandon the cache when it
becomes corrupted. Such is the case here.
To clear the driver cache, open Windows Explorer, and navigate to the C:\
Windows\inf folder. If you see a file named INFCACHE.1, delete it immediately.
If Windows won??™t let you delete the file, see ???Delete In-Use Files??? in
Chapter 2.
When you??™ve excised the file, try uninstalling and then reinstalling the misbehaving
device to reinstall the driver.
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