Weird Driver Problem - Need Ideas...

[chewster77]

i have a Sony Cybershot DSC-P72 and have always been able to dowload the pictures through the USB port.

I came in one day and the computer had locked up and had some low voltage error, i can't remember exactly what it said (i should have written it down). anyways, i had to power off and reboot manually.

once the computer was back up and running the computer would no longer let me get pictures off the camera because it didn't have a driver installed. when the camera is plugged in and turned on it shows up in the device manager but has the yellow exclamation point. i went to sony's website and downloaded a driver and installed it via the .exe file but it won't take. no matter what i do the driver doesn't install and i can't get pictures off the camera.

i've went into the winnt and system 32 folders and deleted/re-installed the .inf files but have had no luck.

i'm not familiar with the registry and wasn't sure if there is something in there i need to delete that is stopping me from installing the driver.

its just really weird that all of a sudden it can't recognize the camera.

anyone got any ideas of what to do?

 

[440bx]

The first thing you need to do is to ensure that the USB port(s) are working properly. USB ports are supposed to provide a certain amount of power (can't remember how much right now... it's either too late or I'm getting too old, or both!). If the USB port is not providing as much power as the camera expects, that would explain the problems you're having.

A reasonable test would be to plug a working flashdrive into each USB port and make sure it is recognized in each port. If it isn't then the USB ports are suspect.

If all USB ports work fine then it would be time to test the camera itself. Take it to any other computer, plug it into one of the USB ports *and* attempt to transfer pictures to that machine. If that doesn't work then your camera is suspect.

If both of the above tests are successful then it is reasonable to presume that the problem is software based and it is specific to your machine. The first thing to do would be to uninstall whatever software you got from Sony and then re-install it (though this should not be necessary, Sony likes to do things "differently"). If that doesn't work then the most likely source of the problem would be the USB drivers on your machine, to correct that kind of problem, the first thing I'd do is reinstall the motherboard drivers (they include the low level part of the necessary USB drivers), if it still does not work after that, I'd delete the USB ports and controllers from the Device Manager and reboot (let Windows reinstall the drivers), if that still does not correct the problem, it is likely that you may have to reinstall Windows.

HTH.