Switching between Win drivers, quickly

[Harry Bloomfield]

A general DIY group I know, but some very knowledgeable people in it..

I have a single USB dongle and for two very different sets of software, I need to have it use two very different drivers.

The first driver installed and working will show up as a device in libusb (WinUSB) devices, which is rather a special driver.

The second will show in devices Sound, Video and Game Controllers.

What I would like to be able to do, is have a fool proof (I'm the fool) method of instantly switching between them, if that is possible.

At the moment, I'm having to go into Device Manager and disable the one I don't want and reinstall the one I do want, which is cumbersome.

[Peter Crosland]

Unless there is some specialist software or workaround, to do this then you could try two different profiles but that might require rebooting.

[Graham.]

Or run one session in a virtual machine.

[Jethro_uk]

Use Linux ? It can swap drivers in and out with a single command.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Its a Win7 laptop and the software in Windows.

[The Natural Philosopher]

quite likely run both together..

[Adrian C]

Devcon commands can be scripted.

[Brian Gaff]

Surely the software that actually uses the drivers should know which one is theirs and which is not?

Brian

[Brian Gaff]

There used to be some software for Win 98 for this sort of problem but I've never seen one for xp and up.

I suppose you could write script to close a process and start another but there could well be special ways to close the drivers that you won't be aware of.

I still feel that they should not interfere with each other unless you use both bits of software at the same time. If they do, the design is naff. I find many drivers for parts of sound cards and they don't seem to have issues. Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think the issue is they are not mutually compatible.

its one ting to have a driver with two interfaces but two drivers accessing te same hardware is..difficult.

[Martin Brown]

Seems unlikely. Reading between the lines and the OPs HAM tag I would hazard a guess from the mention of libUSB that it is a driver that subverts a particular DTV chipset into a software defined radio.

I haven't tried mine on Win7 yet as I have various spare XP machines lying around that I don't mind running "interesting" software on.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Spot on!

[Harry Bloomfield]

I've now tried having the two drivers in two separate profiles and that doesn't work - any installed driver, shows in both or all profiles.

[Harry Bloomfield]

That is well beyond me!

[Adrian C]

OK, watch this on youtube - you can kill the techno music.

"Enable/Disable drivers in one click using DevCon+Batch file"

[Harry Bloomfield]

That a very fast video, but devcon looks doable, thanks very much!