My Tussle with the So-Called “Richard Berry Driver”
Alright, let me share something I went through recently. I got my hands on this old, weird piece of hardware. Looked like some kind of specialized input device, maybe for CAD or something? No labels, just a weird connector. Plugged it into an old machine I keep around for tinkering. Of course, Windows had no idea what it was. That’s where the fun began, right?
So, I started digging online. Just typed in the few hardware IDs I could pull. After wading through pages of junk, I landed on some ancient forum thread. Someone mentioned needing the “Richard Berry Driver” for a similar mystery device. Never heard of it. Sounded specific, maybe named after the guy who wrote it?
Finding this thing was a real pain. Most links were dead, pointing to websites that probably vanished a decade ago. It felt like digital archaeology. I spent a good chunk of an afternoon just chasing ghosts. Finally, on some dusty corner of the internet, tucked away in an obscure FTP directory, I found a file named something like rb_drv_*. Felt like striking gold, or maybe just rust.
Getting it onto the machine was step one. Then came the installation. Unzipped it, ran the setup executable. Compatibility warnings popped up immediately. Ignored them, like we always do, right? The installer bar moved slowly, then just froze. Had to kill the process. Great start.
Tried again. This time I ran it in compatibility mode for Windows XP. Seemed to finish, asked for a reboot. Okay, progress? After restarting, the system felt sluggish. Checked Device Manager. The mystery hardware was still showing up with a yellow exclamation mark. The driver installed, but it wasn’t working right.
- Tried uninstalling, cleaning registry traces (carefully!), reinstalling. Same result.
- Tried pointing Device Manager directly to the .inf file in the driver folder. Nope.
- Looked inside the .inf file itself, just plain text. Saw some hardware IDs listed, matched mine. So it should work?
- Fiddled with some settings in the BIOS, thinking maybe it was an interrupt conflict. Wasted an hour there.
Honestly, it felt like banging my head against a wall. You know how it is with old tech. Sometimes it just doesn’t want to play nice with anything modern, or even slightly less ancient. This “Richard Berry Driver,” whoever Richard Berry was, clearly wasn’t designed for the setup I had, even though it was an old machine.
In the end, I couldn’t get the device fully working. Got it recognized sometimes, but it was unstable, crashing the program I wanted to use it with. I just gave up. Pulled the darn thing out of the computer and put it back in the box.
It’s funny, sometimes. You spend hours trying to revive some obsolete piece of junk. Why? Maybe just the challenge? Or maybe because we hate throwing things away. It reminds me of trying to patch up old codebases at previous jobs. You spend ages understanding someone else’s logic, fixing one bug creates two more, and you wonder if a rewrite would’ve been faster. But you stick with it, because that’s the task at hand. This driver hunt felt just like that. A lot of effort for… well, a story to tell, I guess.
