This is just a quick note for anyone who is trying to get his/her xbox 360 (or compatible) controller to work on Windows XP SP1 or SP2. It doesn’t matter whether you have Home or Professional edition, or 32 or 64 bit for that matter. The driver that you can download from Microsoft.com does not work. Whatever you do, it keeps giving you a message that only says “the installation did not complete”.
There is, however, a solution for this problem. There are two of them to be exact that don’t involve any hacking or cracking or anything nearly that hard to do.
- Download a driver package from Microsoft Hardware
Just choose the kind of hardware, which is “controllers” in this case, then choose the kind of controller, then your operating system (Windows, Windows, Windows or Windows) and last you choose the language of your operating system and there you go, you get a download that is considerably larger than the one you get from Microsoft.com when using a search and I guess that that has a reason. - Use Windows Update to get the driver, worked for me.
I haven’t actually tried option 1, but various forums informed me that this works, but simply using Windows Update is still the easiest way to aquire Microsoft drivers.
Anyway, I hope this helps anyone who might stumble across my blog while searching for a solution to get his/her xbox 360 controller to work on Windows XP.
I’m not sure why you can also download a Vista driver from the list on Microsoft Hardware, because Vista has native support for these controllers, beit wired or wireless.
