Installing Windows Server 2008 R2 on a HP Elitebook 8540w – the elusive smartcard driver location

This week one of the Microsoft employees came to me and asked about using the HP Elitebook 8540w with Windows Server 2008 R2 as his production workstation environment.  In our corporate environment, that means the machine must have a rather stringent set of requirements that must be met to connect to our network on a regular basis.

One of those requirements is the use of a smartcard.  The HP 8540w has a built-in smartcard reader but if you go look at the hp.com driver download area, good luck finding it.  It’s actually there but it’s so thoroughly buried you would have an extremely difficult time finding it. 

So where is the elusive driver? It’s actually part of the install package for the media card reader driver.  The media card and smartcard readers are apparently both made by Ricoh. 

I can only assume someone decided it would be intuitive to slap both sets of drivers into one package and you would just use your Kreskin abilities to figure it out.  We did, so you don’t need to.

And now due to the magic of Bing and Google, you can actually find the answer.  The link above is a link to the landing page for the driver, not a link to the actual install package.  On that page is the download button that will provide the sp46972.exe installation package.  If you install that, you’ll magically get the drivers for both readers and they should start working properly with R2.  When you insert your smartcard, make sure you have internet connectivity so the .Net driver will flow down off the update.microsoft.com servers.

[Note] It appears there is another later version of the package.  The guy that came to me for help tested sp46972.  This newer package coughs up sp46999.exe and is on the HP FTP server at ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp46501-47000/sp46999.exe.