Brian Gregory wrote:
On 13/07/2018 07:48, VanguardLH wrote:
pjp wrote:

I have an old Creative Webcam Gen3. Under XP it required a driver and
that's the last one available. Driver is very old, basically unuasable
in todays OS's.

As a curiousity I plugged it into a couple of Win7 32 bit pcs and they
all saw the camera, downloaded a driver and it was seen as a Windows
Imaging Device and it worked. Under 64 bit Win7 it can't locate a
driver!!!

Same thing happened in last 24 hours, 64 bit Windows with a bluetooth
dongle and it's go looking yourself. 32 bit downloads a driver that
appears to work properly.

Is this a common occurence?

Probably because the last driver provided by Creative (Microsoft doesn't
write the drivers, they just included them in later versions of Windows)
was a 32-bit driver. Unless Creative created a 64-bit driver, there
isn't one for Microsoft to bundle with a later version of Windows.


I think Microsoft writes some drivers but not many.


Microsoft writes "Class" drivers, which take into
account the "quirks" of various commercial offerings.

There would be Class drivers for USB2 and USB3 and Firewire.
USBStor or UASPStor would be examples of layers above
the physical layer.

I couldn't tell you whether Bluetooth has sufficient
standards to have a "standard register set" on a dongle,
so a single driver can handle all of them.

USB has class declarations so the device can be
declared as "Custom", and then nobody but the
device manufacturer can offer a driver. As only they
know what functions the registers perform.

Paul