Are you getting a specific or message in Device Manager?
If you have recently connected an Android smartphone or an older feature phone to your Windows 10 PC for USB tethering, you might have stumbled upon a peculiar file name in your Device Manager or driver details: . At first glance, the "XP" in the filename suggests it belongs to an era of Windows that Microsoft officially ended support for in 2014. So why does this driver appear on Windows 10, and how does it function?
While Windows 10 and 11 have built‑in plug‑and‑play support for modern Android phones, many users still encounter “driver not found” errors. A Microsoft Q&A thread shows dozens of users on Windows 10 struggling to get USB tethering to work. One user wrote that “the Windows 10 laptop showed that there were no drivers present” when they tried to use USB tethering with their Samsung Galaxy A03s and Nokia One Plus. In such cases, installing the RNDIS driver using tetherxp.inf manually often resolves the issue.
Select Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer . Have Disk: Click the Have Disk... button. microsoft driver tetherxp.inf windows 10
Finding a driver file called tetherxp.inf usually means you are trying to share your smartphone's cellular data with your computer through a USB cable. While Microsoft originally designed this configuration file for Windows XP, many users still look for it when modern USB tethering fails on Windows 10.
: This error can occur if the INF file references a specific driver file (like a .sys file) that is missing or corrupted, or if there is a path/permission issue.
a few seconds as Windows 10 will automatically install the correct network adapter. Troubleshooting on Windows 10 Are you getting a specific or message in Device Manager
pnputil /enum-devices /class Net pnputil /install-driver C:\path\to\tetherxp.inf /device "your-device-instance-id"
Some older device drivers struggle with USB 3.0 (blue) ports. Try plugging into a USB 2.0 (black) port if available.
The file is a legacy configuration file primarily used to enable USB tethering on Windows XP systems. It is not a standard driver for Windows 10, as modern Windows versions (Windows 7 and later) have built-in support for Remote NDIS (RNDIS) devices used in mobile tethering. Key Takeaways & Usage So why does this driver appear on Windows
However, the real driver file remained on disk for optional manual install.
The INF file tells the Windows operating system how to handle the incoming USB connection and instructs it to use the built-in Remote NDIS (RNDIS) driver.
Click Browse and navigate to the location where you saved the tetherxp.inf file. Install: Select the file and click Open, then OK.