Solved Cheap peripherals no longer recognised / saved after recent Windows 10

Hi!

first time posting here, so I hope I don't break any unwritten rules. I have an older PC (specs at the bottom) that I upgraded to Windows 10 (from 7) a few months ago. Everything was fine until a recent Windows update (a month ago?).

I have two cheap USB peripherals that I actively use. An offbrand XBox 360 wireless receiver and a cheap WiFi dongle. I am used to Windows not knowing what to make of these two devices and having to manually point it towards the correct drivers.

An earlier Windows 10 update already broke the drivers for these two devices, and I had to manually set them up again (a minor annoyance) but the problem with this recent update is that reassigning the correct drivers doesn't do anything anymore.

The two peripherals show up in the Device Manager as usual, I assign them their correct drivers ("XBox 360 Wireless Receiver" and "Realtek RTL8192CU Wireless LAN 802.11n USB 2.0 Network Adapter" respectively), windows informs me that it has successfully installed these drivers and the device is now active, refreshes the Device manager and... nothing has changed.

I'd really like to be able to use these two devices again, but googling around hasn't given me any leads so far. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

(Some notes:

• I have tried rebooting my PC between hardware installation attempts
• I have tried different USB ports
• There are no further Windows 10 updates pending that might correct this issue
• Since this affects two devices (and they are actually showing up in the device manager) it is unlikely/~impossible that the hardware just broke.

)

Thank you for your time.

Windows Version number: 19041.388

Specs:

• AMD FX-4130 Processor
• ASUS M5A99X EVO R2.0 Motherboard
• ASUS GTX660 Ti-DC2O-2GD5, GeForce GTX 660 Ti Graphics card
• 16GB RAM (Corsair Vengeance Low Profile)

Bastet said:

Hello & welcome.
Have you tried the Realtek drivers?

RTL8192EU Software - REALTEK

www.realtek.com

Have you tried completely uninstalling the devices & deleting the drivers, restarting the PC then installing the drivers & connecting the devices?

Click to expand...

Hello, thank you for the warm welcome.
I tried that when the issue first arose and again just now, the problem with that suggestion is that the dongle isn't actually a realtek (it's an ISY) so installing the realtek drivers doesn't help Windows identify the device. I used to use the driver mentioned in my original post because it uses the same chipset and works.
Same as with the controller driver, it's intended for an official Microsoft wireless receiver, but works because it's ~identical.

The problem isn't that I don't know what drivers I need, the problem is that Windows won't register/retain when I assign these drivers.
So I can make it all the way to here, same as I've done many times on multiple devices:


Only to press "Close" and have it go right back to being an "Unknown Device".

Yeah, it turns out that the solution was indeed to manually install drivers. The solutions were different for each device, but it basically boiled down to that.

For the WiFi dongle a third party driver assistant did the trick (the free version of DriverMax in this case, but I'm sure it's not the only option).

For the 360 controller I followed this Reddit guide to manually overwrite/update the Windows driver with the device ID of my particular dongle:


Thank you for your help!