I'm trying to assist my father in law with setting up his PR3, he is running Vista and this help is over the phone. I downloaded the installation information from the Digitrax site and see from older posts that the install must be done exactly as the instructions indicate. The disk he got doesn't have a seperate driver file on it, that he told me anyway when I had him read me what was on the list. He went and downloaded the Vista driver from the site and so did I , but again, there isn't a .dvr file that comes with that either???
That said, with everything plugged in and looking through device manager there doesn't appear to be any Com port associated with the PR3, which tells me the hardware hasn't been found yet. Now I haven't called him today to see if the PR3 actually registers in control panel as one other post suggested, so I could remove the hardware , will have to check that.
I don't have a PR3 here to run through it, and I'm pretty sure it should be telling him that it has FOUND NEW HARDWARE, however he says that when he hooked everything up and put the disk in he did not ever receive a message saying it has found new hardware. He has sent it back and had it checked, they told him the PR3 was functioning fine and even sent him a new USB cable. He has a second PC running XP and I told him to take the disk and the PR3 and USB cable over to that one and hook it up to see if the FNH message appears there, and then of course if it does, then I will have to go into control panel and remove the PR3 from his Vista machine. But if it's not that, can you suggest any other help?
I have helped him install the Soundloader software already, and suggested he also try plugging in the power, as the USB port might not have enough power, but he said he tried that and that has not worked. Without the machine registering the new hardware, I'm at a loss.
Thanks
Per the manual, try the USBDeview utility to remove any instance of the PR3 driver, which shows up as VCOM.
Unplug the PR3, and reboot.
Before plugging in the PR3, unzip the driver download (Vista can extract the files without any extra utilities). There's only an INF file and the CAT file.
Now, plug in the PR3 and it should prompt to find a driver. Browse to the extracted files and click on the INF file. This should install the PR3 driver and you should be fine.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
I had a lot of trouble with my pr 3 and vista ,turned out to be the cable that came w/ it, used one that I had laying around works good on the desk top .....w/ vista ,I do know that I use the usb ports on front of computer and I must plug the pr3 back into the very same usb port or I well have to refind it ,the pr3 dont like to find it on its own,,,but the computor does do the found new hardware thing(Im not a savy computor guy).now I still havent got it to work with my laptop some type off issue with the mouse finger pad & the program ,I think I need a cordless mouse . but make no mistake once you get it working its the only ticket ......just remember the port or leave it pluged in....Jerry