Saturday, October 20, 2012

Using the ATI Remote Wonder in Windows 7

The ATI Remote Wonder only has drivers for Windows XP and earlier versions. The latest XP driver is version 3.04. It's still available from AMD. If it becomes unavailable, look for 3-04_rw_enu.exe for English-only and 3-04_rw.exe for multilanguage.

I installed from 3-04_rw_enu.exe. Everything seemed fine before the reboot, but afterwards I saw the following:

C:\Program Files\ATI Multimedia\RemCtrl\drivers\wdreg_gui.exe Error
Error updating the driver (hid:*WINDRVR6) with the INF file: The system cannot find the file specified.


The command reporting the error was:

"C:\Program Files\ATI Multimedia\RemCtrl\drivers\wdreg_gui.exe" -inf "C:\Program Files\ATI Multimedia\RemCtrl\drivers\ATIRWVD.INF" install

This error may relate to Jungo WinDriver. The program ran, but there was no tray icon and the remote did not work. An optional Remote Wonder update became available on Windows Update, but that did not make the remote work.

To make it work, I installed the X10 drivers from x10drivers.exe. The installer also contains drivers for other X10 hardware, but that is not a problem. It fails to create an Install.log file for uninstall, so uninstall fails. If you want to fix that, grab it from %Temp% by creating a hard link to the right randomly named and currently in use temporary file when the installer says the install succeeded. That's not of much use though, because using it, the uninstaller just deletes a directory with a few internet shortcuts and removes the uninstall entry. If you want to remove the driver, you could remove it from the Driver Store using pnputil, but that's neither necessary nor recommended.

There may be another alternative, setup_rwplus_xp_vista.exe, but I don't recommend it. That file contains the same version of X10 drivers, but it also creates a bunch of HID devices in Device Manager that are difficult to get rid of. The installer also fails to create Install.log, and it doesn't even pause to let you grab the file from %Temp%.

Finally, you may want to customize some things. There's a site with various plugins for the Remote Wonder software. If you want to customize almost any key, then install the RW Key Factory plugin. For total freedom to customize any key, or if you want to try an alternative to the ATI program, try RW Key Master.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello, I wish to use my ATI Remote Wonder on Windows 7 64-bits but whereas Windows detected the receiver instantly after plugging it, installing the "ATI Remote Wonder Software" v3.04.0.0 (2006-05-24) from http://www2.ati.com/drivers/3-04_rw.exe didn't make the remote work.

Following your tutorial I wanted to install X10 drivers from ftp://ftp.x10.com/pub/applications/drivers/x10drivers.exe but the x10.com site seems to have be shut down (temporarly? more on http://x10pro-usa.com/about-us).

Would you happen to have this holy-grail "x10drivers.exe" file somewhere we can download it?

Thanks

Unknown said...

Finally found it inside a ZIP from the "Video box" VB project by cs_optimist (http://codes-sources.commentcamarche.net/source/43820-video-box-vb) :
http://poilodent.paris.free.fr/VideoBox.zip

It seems that eventghost.org also offers theses drivers to download:
http://www.eventghost.org/downloads/

If it helps someone...

Unknown said...

It helped me Claude, thank you for posting an updated link to the X10 drivers.
Also thanks to the author of this clear guide, it worked fine on my Win7 64-bit.

Mike Monroe said...

Thank you Claude, and thanks for this guide as well.