Installing and Troubleshooting Pickering PXI cards under Windows

After downloading Pickering NI-VISA driver, please go through the installation process. When installation has been completed, check whether a card has been installed properly or not. One of the common ways to check that a card is installed properly is looking at the Device Manager entries.

Usually when you install Pickering Drivers it will prompt you to restart your PC. You must reboot your PC to accomplish the driver installation process and to allow the driver to recognize Pickering cards. Sometimes the driver does not recognize PXI card for various reasons. These common reasons are explained below.

Let's say the driver has been installed as the Pickering Pipx40 VISA driver. The devices should then be seen under NI-VISA PXI Devices in the Device Manager, but it could happen that the cards in the device manager are shown as other devices and have not been recognized correctly.

As shown below Pickering cards are not installed under NI-VISA PXI Devices. They appear as PCI Devices instead of Pickering PXI cards and some cards appear under Pickering Interfaces PXI3 (which would be correct when using the Pickering Direct I/O driver).

Screenshot of Device Manager showing where Pickering cards are installed in Windows 7

In this case the Pickering cards neither installed as NI-VISA PXI Devices nor installed as Pickering Interfaces PXI3. They are appeared as PCI Device.

Screenshot of Device Manager showing where Pickering cards are installed in Windows XP

In this case the Pickering cards are installed as Pickering Interfaces PXI devices instead of NI-VISA PXI Devices.

Screenshot of Device Manager showing where Pickering cards are installed in Windows XP

One reason could be, if you had Pickering (Pipx40 or Pilpxi) driver installed before an un-installation of the driver may leave some .pnf, .inf or .oem files in the Windows\inf folder. These files will still hold the information of the previously installed cards and may cause clash with the newly installed driver files. These files can be removed or deleted manually from folder \\:c\windows\inf. The picture below shows the Pickering Pipx40 and Pilpxi files in the inf folder.

Screenshot of where to find Pickering Pipx40 and Pilpxi files

The same problem can occur if a new PXI card gets inserted into a chassis for the first time or an existing one gets swapped into a different slot. To avoid these from happening it is always advised to un-install Pickering driver completely from the control panel before installing another driver version. We recommend that if you want to install Pickering pipx40 VISA driver and you had the Pickering Pilpxi Direct I/O driver installed, please un-install the Pilpxi driver from the control panel, before you go ahead and install the VISA driver and vice versa.

After installing a Pickering driver and the PC boots, you will see a pop-up in the task-bar with a Found New Hardware message.

Screenshot of pop-up of found new hardware

When you click the pop-up message it will take you to the Device Manager or "Found New Hardware Wizard" below will appear.

Screenshot of installing new hardware wizard

In the Found New Hardware Wizard choose No, not this time option and click Next.

Screenshot of selecting no to letting Windows choose the drivers

Choose "Install" from a list of specific location (Advanced) option and click Next.

Screenshot of installing from a list or specific location

Check if the Show compatible hardware is checked and select the listed Model, then click Next.

Screenshot of model shown in the hardware wizard

Select "Don't search. I will choose the driver to install" and click Next.

Screenshot of choosing to find drivers manually

The system will go through (takes a while) the process to find the right driver files for the card

Screenshot of the system working to let the computer recognise the card

Finally the driver will be able to recognize the Pickering card.

Just click Finish and repeat the process if more Found New Hardware messages appear.

Screenshot of the wizard finishing installing the driver

When you finished with all cards check that the cards are installed properly.

Go to the Control Panel and double click on the System.

Screenshot of System on the Control Panel page

Choose folder Hardware and click on the Device Manager.

Screenshot of the Hardware tab leading to Device Manager

The Device Manager will now list the cards under NI-VISA PXI Devices, expand by clicking the plus sign next to it.

Screenshot of Device Manager

NI-VISA PXI Devices

Screenshot of Pickering cards displayed in Device Manager

If for any reason you do not see the pop-up in the task bar and there are still cards not installed under Device Manager, please go through some pre-steps before following the steps above:

Go to the Device Manager and (in this case) expand the NI-VISA PXI Devices and find out which card has not been installed.
In the picture below one card appeared as PCI Device.

Screenshot of an unknown PXI card in Device Manager

Right click on the card and select Update Driver.

Screenshot of updating driver in Device Manager

Repeat all the steps above for every card separately.

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