2015-07-07

Wireless Diva

Microsoft diva(tm)
Microsoft's wireless display adaptor is like a diva: having it stored securely in its bag together with other video adaptors and cabling I recently wanted to check its firmware status. To my dismay I couldn't connect to the wireless display adaptor. Not really the first time this diva turns a back on me...


A quick dive into the device manager on my Surface Pro 3 with Win8.1 installed revealed two non-working Microsoft Direct WiFi driver. These won't load, throwing some mysterious code 10 error. Whatever that means, no one seems to know.

My first attempt was to refresh the driver; but they were already recent. So I kicked them out, but without deleting the driver files. Reboot, just to be sure. Still no luck.

So I bit the bullet and next deinstalled the wireless chipset driver for my Surface Pro 3, but again without deleting the driver. One reboot later ... to my surprise I could finally connect to my wireless display diva!

Updating the firmware of the diva now was smooth. Reconnecting the adaptor afterwards also went okay, albeit Microsoft somehow tipped on its own toes because I had renamed the adaptor's device name after the update. But this was easily solved by rescanning for new hardware which found the diva again with its new stage name.

Unfortunately, the wireless display adaptor still don't work with my Samsung Galaxy Tab S ... where it used to work with my old Note 10.1 2014 Edition. Trying to cast the display from a Samsung Galaxy S4 did not work either.

Microsoft's wireless adaptor is a terrible diva. 'nuff said.