Brand-> Dell Inspiron 600m laptop
O/S-> WinXP SP2
RAM->512MB

A friend of mine that works with me is having problems getting flashdrives to recognize on her computer...she has had this problem for quite some time actually..other usb devices work fine on there...what happens is when she plugs them in it brings it up by the tray saying new HARDWARE find and the gives its name which its a lexar firefly jumpdrive 512megs by the WAY. After that it brings up the found new hardware driver instalation wizard...well whenever i would go through that several different ways it would come to cannot install hardware error occurd cuz windows kind find a driver...something along those lines. Well i have gone to lexar, microsoft and a couple other websites and downloaded the driver for it but still does the same thing...and actually all those drivers when they would install would end up saying either driver made only for win95 or 98se or winxp doesn't need to install driver. I have checked in services to make sure plug and play is enabled and checked on the BIOS as well though her bios doesn't MENTION plug and play anywhere to enable or disable it...i have tried my flashdrive on her computer and it does the same thing and i tried her flashdrive on my computer and it brings it right up no problem. I have checked in device manager and it shows that there aren't any driver installed for it or anything...tried updating and all that to the driver and still comes up with the same error...she had on older flashdrive that worked fine on her computer though she lost it and said that it has been about a year since she has used it(since she lost it) so i'm not even sure if this issue happend between that time and if that flashdrive would even work if she found it...not really sure what it is causing the problem...i know xp usually looks for driver itself unlike 95 and 98 but it SEEMS something maybe wrong with the O/S somewhere with a file or somekind causing it to not recognize it...so if anyone has an input it would be appritiated...i told her that maybe completely reinstalling the O/S may just FIX it if it is a corrupted file of some kind. THnx!That's quite a paragraph...
From what i gathered she's running XP correct ?
If so it doesn't need drivers for flash drives.
Have her go to Start/Run and type in sfc /scannow and hit Enter...she should have her XP CD handy as it will ask for it.
Reboot and see what happens.ok i will do that thnx...let you know how it goes.