Smart Board hardware not found every time!

Hello,

Have just installed an oldish smart board at a school and having problems with it. I have installed and used promethean boards many times but never really worked with smart.

I logged in as local admin, connected the board, serial cable straight from board into serial port on pc, connected the power into that cable and then installed the Smart Product Drivers 10.7 SP1 software. It detected the board, light on board went green and it started working perfectly straight away.

I then did a reboot to test, when I logged in again (as local admin) it did not detect the board, light was red and I got a message flashing up asking if I want to search for the board, if I do the search it doesn't find it. The same thing happens when logged in as any user, local or domain (I ultimately need it to work for domain users).

If I log in as a user with full access to device manager (ie, anyone in local admin group) and then go to device manager and right click on the computer name at the top and scan for new hardware, it then finds the board, light goes green and it works. After that it stays working for any users until the computer is rebooted where once again it is not found, even if you log in as local admin. Every time I have to scan for hardware changes when logged in as an admin, then log out and log in as the teacher.

I found some info on the web last night that looked like it pertained to exactly my problem, it said to grant full control permissions for everyone to write to a certain reg key (Smart Technologies Inc. I think) which I did, but it made no difference.

I also put devcon.exe into system 32 and made a batch file with the /rescan switch and put that in all users startup so it would scan for hardware changes everytime. The batch file worked and devcon started and scanned for hardware changes in a cmd box, but it didn't work properly for some reason as it does when I go to device manager and rescan.

I put the teachers ad group into the local admin group on that machine to test which should give them control over everything and also ensure that the devcon batch file I created should run without any problems. Logged in as a teacher, still didn't work.

Can anyone help?

Thanks.

Hi LazyD,

It sounds like the board is working correctly but something is preventing the configuration data for it from persisting in the registry. This is an unusual problem so you may be best served by contacting Steljes technical support directly on 08450 724999.

I got round this by disabling the 'found new hardware alert'. Having said that the board is only interactive when it feels like it. It's a ten year old board with a serial connection that's then got a 10 yard run of cable to the computer, I just put it down to it's age and signal degredation.

Thanks for your replies.

Steljes tech support? I'm assuming thats paid for.. ?

Can I just get an answer to one simple question please: If I log in as admin, install the smart board and get it all working correctly, should it then start and work fine for any other user, be that user domain or local? Would there be anything preventing it working for others users? Could the fact that I didn't install the smart notebook software make a difference?

I've never had Steljes charge for support unless you send them kit for non-warranty repair so they might still be worth a try.

You said you'd applied global write permissions to the SMART Technologies Inc registry key. My machine has that and SMART Technologies under both HKCU and HKLM. Both keys under HKLM appear to have board configuration data under them so I'd check that they both have global write permissions if they both exist.

In my experience though if you get it working correctly under a local admin account it should just work for other users.