You should at least let the install hardware wizard finish it's job. Looking on the web can take some time, especialy for some odd or older devices. Don't press Cancel before you have a message that the wizard cant find anything.
Try connecting it to another USB port. Some times, for some obscure reason, a device simply refuse to work when connected to a specific port on a given computer.
There is also the possibility that some devices could be deffective. Try them on some other computer. If it don't work on at least 3 different computers in addition to yours, it should be considered deffective or dead.
In some cases, notably with storage USB devices, it can mean an improper formating or corrupted file system. If you can find some other computer that accept that device, SAVE any data you may want to keep and reformat.
For some reason, some computers are more fault tolerant than others.
A crutial service may be disabled.
From the start menu, open the "Run..." dialog and type "services.msc" (without the quoted) to open the Services manager.
Make sure that "Plug-and-Play" is set to "Automatic".
Make sure that "Windows installer" is set to "Manual"
Make sure that "Windows update" is set to "Automatic" or "Automatic (differed start)".
As you want to transfert files to/from another computer, it could be much simpler to use an ethernet cable to connect the two and set a folder as a shared folder on each computers.
That way, you can transfert files between the computers straight from the Windows explorer. Drag the files and drop them to the shared folder of the other computer that is visible under "Network" at the bottom of the left pane.
Electro, November 2013
