I had a small issue with my new wireless dongle that was causing it to disconnect from my router and become unable to reconnect to the same router without being reset – [disconnected|disabled] and [reconnected|re-enabled] – but it always happened while I was at work. This meant that I could not access my computer until I got home, and I could not access the internet until I reset the dongle.

I decided my best course of action would be to add a task to the Task Scheduler which would detect the error and disable then re-enable the dongle, thus fixing the problem without requiring my interaction. There was, however, one small hitch: Task Scheduler cannot interact directly with devices, and there is no built-in command line controller for the Device Manager in Vista.

This new issue led me to search for a command line interface for the Device Manager, and as luck would have it I found one. DevCon. And as my luck would have it, it is available for x86 and ia64 platforms only. Since ia64 is not the same as x64, and the x86 version cannot interact directly with x64 devices, I had come to a brick wall. Fortunately, I’m a resourceful person, and I found – through no small feat, I might add – an x64 version of DevCon. I now make this version of DevCon available to you. For information on the usage of DevCon, please refer to the Microsoft documentation page here.

You may download devcon_x64.zip below. It contains the x64 version of devcon.exe ONLY! This x64 version of devcon.exe will work on XP64 and Vista64 with AMD64 processors (e.g. Intel Core 2 / Intel Xeon and AMD Phenom / Athlon 64)  but WILL NOT WORK on Itanium (ia64) processors.

DevCon x64 (Version x64 (AMD64)) - 5207 Hits