If you are like me, then you certainly throw away or lose CDs containing drivers for your hardware. I mean: Why should you not? These days, every hardware vendor has the most current drivers on it’s webpage, ready to be downloaded.
Actually, using the drivers on the CD often does not even work… You know – little or now quality management.
But then, there is my Audigy 2 NX card. I bought it, so I can hook my AC3-Receiver to my ThinkPad when watching an occasional DivX movie with AC3-Sound. For that matter, I have not used the little silvery box for the last five months or so. As I noted before, I have long lost the driver CD.
You can certianly imagine how annoyed I was when I saw that Creative Labs only provides driver updates requiring the original driver to be already installed.
I don’t even want to think what I would have to do to get back to a CD or a full installer. I can well imagine that the support – if it even answers my calls for help – would really like to see me buy another package – just for a new driver CD (which I will lose again – eventually)
So, I needed another solution.
This is what I did:
- Plug in your the Audigy and turn it on
- Download and run the driver installer (the older of both versions)
- Wait for it to tell you that the software must be installed
- Go to [Path_to_profile]Local SettingsTemp (mostly c:Documents and Settings[your username]) and look for a folder just created. If you don’t want to search, use Process Explorer and look what handles the installer has opened.
- In this directory, you’ll find a folder named “Drivers”. Copy that to somewhere else
- Open the Device Manager (Start – Settings – Control Panel – System – Hardware – Device Manager or much faster Windows-Pause)
- Right-Click on your Soundcard (either not recognized or recognized as “USB Audio Device”), select “Update Driver…”
- Don’t let the assistant install anything automatically
- Provide the path where you copied the Drivers directory to in step 5
- Windows will install the driver which creative’s installer would not have let you to
- Click “OK” in the installer from Creative. It’ll think that the original software ist installed, re-install your manually installed driver, flash the card’s firmware and exit nicely
This saved me from a lot of stupid asking-arond or even re-buying a piece of hardware I already own.
I can’t understand why Creative Lab’s does not provide un-crippled installers for their drivers. This procedure is far from obvious and many non-geeks are probably not able to do this. If this policy should be a new business-case in selling more products, I don’t really see how this will work in the long run…
Anyway. I could get it to work and I will now please myself watching this DivX-Video using my beamer and my AC3-Receiver. ;-)
gnegg 