How do I know which one of these is true ? One message says the driver is installed, the other one says he's still installing it. Like, Huh ? The little spinning circle just keeps on, like forever. 
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 26 '12 at 20:46
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There is a blue circle next to "Installing driver software". When it is finished, this will be either a green tick or a red cross to specify the outcome of the installation. |
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As noted by @Jamie, the system will have an icon for the result. However, I have seen cases where a window has popped under other windows and is waiting for input from the user. Pressing ALT-TAB will quickly show such a window. |
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Think of the blue text as more of a general header. It is not giving you status information, it is simply telling you that the device has been installed (i.e., connected). The black text is the one giving you status information about the driver installation. Some devices are actually composed of multiple components (like external drives) and so will have more than one line and spinning circle. When you install hardware, Windows has to identify it then install drivers for it as well as all of its constituent components. This can take quite a while if you are using a freshly installed system or have used a cleanup tool to remove temporary files. This happens because Windows must built a driver cache by reading and parsing every single driver in its driver store. In Windows Vista+, this can mean several thousand How long has it been spinning? Do you see the hard-drive light flickering, indicating that the system is using the drive? If the HDD LED is flickering, then just leave it be and Windows will eventually finish. If it is not flickering at all, then Windows may be stuck. You could try unplugging it and plugging it back in to see if Windows will get it right the next time. You could also try installing it in safe-mode. An easier thing to do is to check your Internet connection because what may be happening is that Windows is trying to find a driver on Windows Update, but it cannot connect, so it is hanging there. Also, check for any firewall prompts because I have seen plenty of programs seemingly “freeze” when all that was happening is that it was trying to access the Internet, and the firewall threw up a prompt asking whether to grant it permission, but the prompt got hidden somehow (clicked Show Desktop just after the prompt was display?) and so the app was left hanging, waiting for permission. |
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