Hardware drivers

Ending the recurring driver installation in XP

On starting your computer, Windows XP prompts you to install some hardware. Obviously you have checked the device manager for any hardware conflicts. But here, there is neither a yellow exclamation mark nor a red stop mark that points to any incompatibilities or missing resources. In this case, the root cause for this annoying, persistent message is a wrongly ‘remembered’ installation status.

Windows XP saves information about newly detected devices in a cache file. Normally, this is deleted after successfully installing the drivers. If Windows fails to do that, you can help it out. Open the folder ‘INF’ in the Windows directory. Rename the file ‘INFCACHE.1’, for example to ‘INFCACHE. Old’ to force Windows XP to create a new status for the connected hardware devices.

Now restart your system. If all goes well, you can delete ‘INFCACHE.old’.