I'm trying to set up an MKR1000 on an old-ish HP Pavilion dv6 laptop from approximately 2010, running a fully up-to-date version of Windows 7. As many have noted, the installation instructions do not work; the board is never plug-and-play recognized as a port in Device Manager. Instead, something screwy happens; once the board is plugged in, Windows recognizes it as a new device, but it does so repeatedly, every few seconds, and keeps saying it did not install correctly. The device manager keeps refreshing, and the only new device the system finds is one with a blank name. I tried manually installing the hardware via hdwwiz.exe, the hardware installation wizard, using all the different drivers people have recommended here. All gave the same result: an error message stating that the driver was installed correctly, but the device could not start.
Throughout most of this, there were two green lights illuminated on the board while it was plugged in, and also an amber light that would flash on and off. However, at some point I noticed the amber light wasn't flashing anymore, and also that Windows stopped making the plug-n-play beep when the device was unplugged and plugged back in again.
So, I deleted all the drivers, and the software, and did a System Restore to two days ago to clear out any bad settings I may have introduced. No dice. Windows still doesn't recognize the device at all.
A search of the forum doesn't turn up a set of symptoms quite like what I'm describing. Am I simply dealing with a defective board? Alternatively, is this simply the wrong computer to be trying this with?