Tuesday 17 May 2011

Older Smart Boards with Windows 7 x64


Some Smart boards back in the day came didn't want to be that easy and decided to use a "USB-Serial Controller" device to connect to your computer. Now in Windows XP 32bit this came within the standard Smart Drivers you can easily download from SmartTech, but unfortunately with a 64bit operating systems, especially Windows 7, this device commonly is not found within this driver pack and needs to be sourced via a third party.

Luckily with help from a blog from Visible Procrastinations there is a easy solution to this.



Installing a fresh copy of SMART Notebook 10 doesn’t load the drivers for this adapter, and Windows ‘yellow triangles’ the device as an unknown ‘USB-Serial controller’. Reading the technical bulletin, we should be able to install the driver from the original SMART Board ie. D:\STI2303X.inf – unfortunately this is not the case.

Having a look at the properties of STI2303X.sys which is the driver that should be being loaded we find;

* Original File name: USB2SER.SYS
* Product Name: PL-2303 OnlyUSB Link Cable

A quick search on Google and we can acquire drivers from the Prolific support site.;

PL-2303 USB to Serial Bridge (H, HX, X) Installshield Driver Setup Program
Installer version & Build date: 1.3.0 (2010-7-15)
Windows 98/ME Driver: v2.0.0.19
Windows 2000/XP/Server2003 (32 & 64-bit) WDM WHQL Driver: v2.0.13.130
Windows Vista/7/Server2008 (32 & 64-bit) WDF WHQL Driver: v3.3.11.152
Language Support: English (default), Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Japanese
For Prolific USB VID_067B&PID_2303 Only

Now in device manager, right click your problem driver and manually source the inf file from the following directory.

C:\Program Files (x86)\SMART Technologies\SMART Product Drivers\PNP Drivers\HidBoard.inf

And we have a working SMART Board.

Update: Recently I have discovered that the 10.8 version of this software is slightly different in where it stores its drivers. If this solution does not work, try to use the drivers included within the orginal install that are hidden in "C:\program files (x86)\SMART Technologies\Drivers\x64" (or x86 if you're on a 32bit machine). It was just by pure luck I found this worked.

2 comments:

  1. Secondary School Technician7 September 2012 at 10:24

    Brilliant, I've spent ages looking for a solution to this and have a whole secondary school full of ancient boards to sort out. Went straight for the x64 folder that v10.8 uses and it worked fine.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great job, thanks mate! I was able to reactivate a SmartBoard built in the year 1999 with Windows 7 x64!

    ReplyDelete

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