It?s one of those classic problems: you?re interested in a piece of hardware, you read that it?s compatible with your setup, and then you decide to buy it. And it doesn?t work after all! This is a problem that a lot of Windows 7 users have with the newer revision of the Xbox One controller (Model 1708, from 2016)
Xbox One controller. You can recognize it?s the newer revision because of the 3.5mm jack at the bottom. Picture from Xbox.com
After going through a lot of proposed solutions scattered in support forums around the web I found the problem: The drivers will only work if you have the User-Mode Driver Framework version 1.11 installed on your Windows 7 machine. If you don?t update your Windows (which your should) or if you only install critical security updates, you might have missed it.
So the steps are:
- Install User-Mode Driver Framework version 1.11 from Windows Update, or directly from Microsoft?s website here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38421
- Install the Xbox One controller drivers. This will happen automatically if you connect the controller and allow Windows to look up for drivers online. If not, the specific installer for 64 bit systems is called xb1usb.11059.0.140526×64.msi, with the MD5 hash of b9b73c5379645826903ac55bb4d26b07. You can Google the filename and check for a mirror, and check the MD5 hash of the file just in case. I got mine from https://www.techspot.com/drivers/driver/file/information/17648/
Hopefully this will help you get the controller working. Cheers!
Edited on August 2018 to correct the wrong extension on the driver?s installer
