Alright, I'll take a swing at it...

On 2015-11-18 05:48, Eternal Hope wrote:

Recently he bought a new gizmo and without reading the installation
document plugged it in, I wasn't there at the time so I don't know what
happened, whatever, unsurprisingly it doesn't work.

When you plug a USB gizmo into a port, Windoze tries to find a suitable
driver, on the C: drive or online. If it finds one it installs it. At
this point, your gizmo will end-up in Device Manager as a "HID Device"
amongst many others, or something slightly similar and just as
enlightening - making it very hard to find which device is the new gizmo.

When I read the documentation it made a point of saying in big black
bold type 'run install program before inserting USB cable into computer'
or words to that effect.

The way it's supposed to work is that you install the driver first, and
it goes into a database (but not used yet, since no gizmo is plugged
in). When you later *do* plug the gizmo, Windoze doesn't go looking on
the internet for a driver, it imediately finds the one you installed
earlier. Most times, it's ok to connect the device in advance, no harm
done (especially if Windoze doesn't find a driver for it at all), when
you later install the driver it is immediately used to drive the gizmo.

I disconnected the device and ran the install program however the
expected configuration dialogs didn't appear, in fact nothing at all
happened.

You should at least see one window, some kind of progress that the
driver is being installed. But it's possible this driver really sucks
and doesn't display anything at all, and just adds itself to the driver
database. It should then get used immediately (or if all else fails, the
next time you unplug and replug the gizmo). As others have pointed out,
there could be a problem if the gizmo is already being driven by a
driver that Windoze downloaded earlier - possibly, Windoze doesn't
replace the driver with the one you have. You then have to locate the
gizmo in Device Manager, uninstall the driver (from the driver TAB),
unplug quickly the gizmo, install your own driver, and replug the gizmo...

When you plug a USB device into Windows 8.1 Windows usually tries to
'install software' presumably some kind of default driver.
If this happened in this case could the default driver, whatever that
may be be 'blocking' attempts to install the new software?

Yes.

If I look under Control Panel - Device Manager - Human Interface
Devices I can see a number of unhelpfully named devices.

Yup, with 10 devices with the same name, that's Windoze for ye...

I right click a
device and view properties. In Properties - Details there is a drop
down list with a whole bunch of properties in it. What I'm trying to do
is find whatever was installed by default and remove it so I can try the
supplied install routine again.

Try to locate the gizmo then uninstall the driver from the driver TAB.
To locate it, since the names are useless, use the HARDWARE-IDS that you
find on the DETAILS TAB. Search for a hardwareID database on the web; I
know of http://pcidatabase.com/ but it might not contain USB IDs...

Is this a reasonable approach, how can I identify which device to
remove, am I looking in the right place ?

Regards,

--
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