Xbox 360 Wireless Controller on Windows 8.1

My son was having issues installing an Xbox 360 Wireless Controller on Windows 8.1. He borrowed his brother's bluetooth USB device and connected that to the USB port. Then he installed the software from Microsoft. The software said it was only compatible on Windows versions XP and 7, but we tried it anyway. The device was detected by Windows (green light on, and new device showing up in Device Manager), but we could not get the controller to pair with the device, The device showed up twice under the Printers and Devices screen - once as a Bluetooth USB device, and once as "Unknown Device". We tried messing with the settings for the Bluetooth USB device, but nothing would make it pair with the controller.

This is what we did to get it to work:

1. I read that there are sometimes issues with the computer giving enough power to USB devices. But you can trick the computer into giving more power to the USB slot by plugging in a USB hub and then plugging the wireless bluetooth adapter into the USB hub. We did this first.

2. We then clicked on the "Unknown Device" (in Control Panel / Devices and Printers) and said we wanted to manually install the driver. We searched the local driver list and selected the category "Xbox" at the bottom of the list, and then found the list of wireless adapters. We selected the bottom one (something like wireless connector 6.2.x). It said the version might not be compatible, but we said to try anyway.

After the above, the controller instantly connected. And then the game was working. I'm not sure which of the above (or both) fixed the issue, but I suspect it was #2.