Windows 7: Devices and Printers icons (Device Stage)

Good luck.

Right,

Well, I promised you folks an update when/if something happened to change in the device stage.

In short - it's all good. But there's something odd about how Device Stage looks for an embeds information regarding devices hooked up to the computer.

After more than a week and a half, going on two weeks with no changes apparent in the "Devices and Printers", I was resigned that somehow the initial installation was a fluke and included the info by default.

However, I found some interesting correlation between the Device Stage info update and IP renewal - as a consequence of my router going down inexplicably one day. Turns out that the devices shown in the Devices and Printers are not updated solely based on the choice of selection (Update automatically setting in the OS)... But as soon as the IP is renewed through the router, the changes occur automatically.

I've replicated the issue twice on two different systems with different hardware.

Here's what I found:
- on a new installation, with Windows activated, I renewed the IP and the Device Stage updated hardware information immediately
- on a new installation, Windows not being activated and renewed IP, the Device Stage did not update the hardware information
- on a new installation, Windows activated, no IP renewal = no upate to hardware information.

Rather strange how IP renewal would affect updates on Win 7.

Interesting. Thanks for the update. I learned something.

That is interesting Orangepit. Thank you for posting back your results on this.

Hi Orangepit

Are you still having this issue you had back in 2009?
It still seems to be a common problem, as I can find many questions about this on the net, but no real answers.. I just did a clean install on my system and have the same problem. At the same time I did a clean install on my Notebook but do not have this problem there. Did you ever find more out about this?

Oh, and the IP renew also did not solve this strange problem.

Very frustrating indeed...

Cheers!

Same thing happened on my system with this latest install & none of the Win update settings helped.

I had to uninstall the drivers and run CCleaner as well as a few other things but can't be certain what eventually made the nice icons appear.

Is there any definite cause & or solution to this?