Espruino web IDE stuck on searching when trying to connect

Hi I am an amateur here, thanks for your time.

I have the espruino board from the kickstarter, only just gotten around to plugging it in many months down the track.

First attempt after installing the com drivers, it instantly found the com port and connected to the device. Beauty! So I hit the "send to espruino" button to try the piece of demo code that loads in the IDE.

I was called to a meeting at that time and upon returning the device had disconnected. Now when I try to connect it gets stuck on "searching" and never finds the device.

I have tried rebooting
I have tried different USB ports
I have tried resetting the espruino re the troubleshooting guide
espruino shows up under "devices and printers" as "STM32 Virtual Com Port" with "drivers unavailable"

Have I bricked it somehow? where can I go from here?

Ok so looks like this is a windows 8.1 problem, works on mac... I hate developing on mac

Hi Rek,

It does sound like a driver problem rather than anything to do with the board... If it doesn't have a COM port assigned (eg. COM20) in 'devices and printers' then the Web IDE won't be able to pick it up.

Did you actually run the executable after installing the drivers? The file you download is a zip, then you run the setup executable from it, and then you have to go to the directory you installed to and run another executable. I'm not entirely sure why it's so complicated, but that's what ST provide :(

If that doesn't work, you could go to the device in 'devices and printers' and choose to manually update the driver, then point it at the directory that you installed the drivers in.