Hey Azzy!
DrAzzy:
When you unplug the board, does COM3 disappear from device manager?
I suspect it will not, indicating that COM3 is something other than the Arduino board.
No! Nothing changes when I plug it or, after I plug it in or when/after I unplug. COM3 remains COM3.
DrAzzy:
If you don't even get the bing noise (or even "this device has malfunctioned) when you plug it in, that's a very bad sign.
Normally I expect to hear that bing sound followed by some unknown/unidentified hardware thing in the device manager. Sadly, didn't even get that much from this board.
DrAzzy:
Are you using a known good USB cable? There's been a plague of bad ones lately, try a different one.
I'm using the cable that came with the board. I'll go home soon and try using a different cable.
DrAzzy:
Did the board ever work?
Today's the first time I tried to connect it to the computers and see if it'd work. It's a new board.
DrAzzy:
Was the Arduino IDE installed on the system via the installer? (installing from zip won't auto-install the drivers).
On the university owned machine, I installed from the zip and it didn't work. On my own laptop, I installed using the regular installer and it still didn't work. So I'm doubting if it has anything to do with the installation method.
DrAzzy:
I see that board has an atmega16u2 as the serial adapter, so the official uno drivers should work (many clones use CH340G or CP2102, which require different drivers - though even these should show as unknown device and make the bing noise when you plug them in w/out drivers).
You see! Normally, when things don't work like that, what I do is that I find the drivers and then go to device manager and find the hardware there and try to point to the drivers from there(update driver). In bad cases, there's at least that "bing" sound followed by "Windows has no clue what in the world you just plugged in" kind of a message. What I can't figure out is why this board is completely undetectable. I've even tried plugging it into a friend's Windows 10 laptop to check it but even that failed to detect ANY signs of anything being plugged into the machine.