Trouble getting windows 7 to recognize android device? Solution

I had to reinstall windows, and the Samsung galaxy (vibrant) refuses to allow me to install the drivers. I found the 64bit and 32bit (I am running windows 7 64 bit), and although it installed the drivers, the device would show up in device manager as just ‘sgh-t959’, and say ‘drivers not installed’ with a yellow exclamation mark on it.

I tried installing samsung KIES, running its ‘troubleshoot connection error’, which appeared to uninstall and reinstall the driver, and yet nothing.

FINALLY I found a solution to force windows 7 64bit to actually recognize that the drivers were installed:

1. Right click on the device in device manager, and go to properties.
2. Under the driver tab, select ‘update driver’
3. Select ‘Browse my computer for the driver software’
4. Now INSTEAD of selecting the folder with the drivers in, click on the bottom text ‘Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer’.
5. Uncheck ‘show compatible hardware’, select your manufacture on the left (Samsung for mine, HTC if that is yours)
6. Scroll down on the right and select the newest ‘SAMSUNG ANDROID ADB INTERFACE VERSION (mine was 5.14.0.0, from 2/5/2010, I selected the second one)
7. Click next, ignore asinine warning

And viola, you have your device showing in the device manager without a yellow exclamation mark!

To test that it is actually working, if you have the android sdk, or adb, open a command prompt (‘cmd’ in the start->run box), go to your android sdk/platform-tools folder (cd c:\android-sdk\platform-tools or whatever folder your adb.exe is in), and type ‘adb devices’, and it should list your device.

Hope this helps someone- spent several days trying tons of drivers, have them all installed, yet windows wouldn’t assign the correct driver to the correct device. So +1 for forcing driver install!