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.
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thanks a ton. worked like a charm!
Wonderful work sir, this worked wonderfully, i used option 1 and it worked first try! Top notch work
It’s good to see that some of my posts are appreciated
Wow, thanks a lot.
thanks , and by the way the option 1 works just fine because its the driver that comes in the cd of the controller so… i would recommend to back it up in a cd so that we dont have this kind of problem again , cause i lost my drivers cd haha but thanks it really works
It boggles my mind how easy this was and that it took so much searching to find this. Thanks so much!
Thanks, I used option 1. But - I have Windows 2003, so I downloaded the one for XP. Normally you can install directly, or run it in XP compability mode (under properties).
But, in order to get this to wotk, I had to rename the exe file to zip, and unpack it. Then, in Install new hardware wizard, I had to install it manually from the xbox360\setup\files folder
Hey ripost, you could probably also just right click the .exe file and choose Open with Winrar if you’re using Winrar. That saves the trouble of renaming it to .zip ^.^
my windows wont validate can someone please just send this file to me …. spoonsol at g mail (dot) com
Buy a legit version of Windows…