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dr_barnowl
16th March 2007, 13:44
I have an X45, and unfortunately, I'm having a lot of trouble with Vista.

Never mind the SST software. I'm having serious trouble with the drivers.

I'm running Vista Business on a Core2 Duo system assembled on an ASUS P5N32-E SLI PLUS motherboard.

Firstly, I downloaded the latest (200107) driver package. On running this, it prompts you to insert the device you want to update. This prompts Vista to install a (broken) generic HID device, which the driver update program will not recognise as a Saitek product.

Getting enterprising, I unpacked the contents of the driver archive into a folder, and used the standard Windows driver update procedure to force an update. Alas, there are two folders to choose from. I've tried with both the folder 053C and 2541. I assumed that one of these was the SST driver (as they are different on non-Vista systems, in my memory), although the SST software is obviously not available.

After this, I also tried installing the XP drivers, which was probably a big mistake too, although the Vista installer seems to upgrade these.

At one point, I got drivers installed, and opened the test panel. The controls function, but there is a serious time lag on both analogue and digital controls. It's like the polling interval is enormous. I was getting responses to button presses up to 11 seconds after holding the button down. I did try playing a game, but the same situation was present there.

My stick appears to be one of the older models mentioned which has a calibration panel (as opposed to an auto-calibrating one).

Alas, if you reboot the machine, the drivers are back to being broken (as in, "the device cannot start up").

I've seen other people posting that they have got the Vista drivers working properly on their X45, so this is frustrating me quite a lot.

I'm having one last try after manually deleting all the DLLs from system32.

Ok..

053C
* The control panel has changed back from the XP one with three POV hat displays to a different one where only one hat is available and the other hats are mapped to buttons.
* Trying the Saitek Driver Update Wizard (SDUW) on this driver is not successful - it juggles the devices around a bit (ending up with a broken one), then it sits there with an hourglass for eternity (or longer than I'm prepared to wait). Watching it like a hawk with Sysinternals Procmon confirms it's doing nothing.

2541 (this folder offers 2 drivers, the USB and the HID

* (HID)
* Does not install, produces a "device cannot start" error.
* (USB)
* Also throws a "cannot start" error.

After manual deletion of driver DLLs from system32, the USB in 2541 also installs (both HID and USB devices) (but spookily, doesn't write any DLLs to system32). This also has the new Vista test panel and the same sluggish behaviour.

Bah. And I really fancied a game of X3 on my shiny new graphics hardware. I can't even fall back to my old MS Force Feedback - no gameport on the motherboard, no gameport support in Vista.

UKSupport
16th March 2007, 14:01
Hi,

I think your problems here have more to do with hardware detection than drivers. You're running an nForce chipset motherboard and we've seen similar delayed response issues on certain nForce motherboards with the X45 in the past.

It may be that the only way around this is to get a PCI USB card installed in your PC. As a PCI USB card has its own chipset it gets around situations like this where the motherboard's USB chipset is having difficulty with a particular device. Installing one and running the controller from that should solve the issue. A PCI USB card typically retails for around £8.

Incidentally, it looks like you have the older X45, in which case it's the 053C driver that applies; not that this will matter once the PC is actually able to correctly identify and work with the hardware.

dr_barnowl
16th March 2007, 14:47
Thanks for the response : I should have trawled the forum a bit more, because the solution was also on another thread.

As I've said there, I managed to solve this by daisy-chaining the X45 through an external USB hub. This would seem to be just as cheap as a PCI card, doesn't consume an internal expansion slot (or require you to open your case), and also gives you a useful peripheral you can take elsewhere!

And yes, the 053C drivers are the ones I needed.

Many thanks again! I'm happily getting used to the weird default control scheme for that old classic, I-War (three dimensional thrust vector composed of throttle, rotate 1 and rotate 2, yipes!).