Windows 8.1 Driver Corruption, Help Please!

[brad.mills212121]

I was trying to diagnose my Xbox 360 wireless adapter to play some games on Steam yesterday. The adapter light would light up but the controller wouldn't connect. I had seen this problem before and all I did was go into the device manager where I can view the wireless adapter that was plugged in. The device manager showed it as an unknown device, so I right clicked went to "properties", then "driver" tab, then "update driver", then "browse my computer for driver software", then "let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer", and then scrolled down to the latest driver I had installed. I was then prompted by a statement along the lines of "This driver does not match the OS you have and may cause issues with your computer if you continue to install". But I swore this was the driver that worked last time so I continued to install. Now, my disk is bogged down with 100% use and I'm assuming there is a corruption caused by the driver. I tried cleaning my computer, reverting back to a couple of previous versions of my system, and running check disk and nothing has worked so far. Maybe I have gone about the processes wrong or there is another way to work around this. If anyone has any advice, please let me know.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

xbox 360 drivers should be installed using the driver utility from microsoft.
get the Windows 7 64bit version and install by running as administrator and in compatibility for Windows 7.
https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-id/d/xbox-360-wireless-controller-for-windows
Afterwards reboot and it should work.

If not, you can start googling around and/or wait for another person to respond here.
Or just upgrade to Windows 10 because 8/8.1 is a bad OS.
Upgrading is free.
just download the Microsoft Media Creation Tool and have a flash drive with at least 8GB of space and create a bootable drive.
Can perform the upgrade right inside windows from there.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
(Ignore the update. Just get the tool.)

P.S. - 360/Xbone controller support is baked into Windows 10 and requires no driver installation.