USB drivers on the xperia play

I'm helping out a friend with rooting Xperia play, I spent 5 hours trying to root it yesterday with him and we couldn't. We tried gingerbreak and z4mod but they did not work, so we tried the fastboot way and I can't seem to get the drivers installed properly. Whenever I try the command to check for the phone in cmd the phone shows no response as if he wasn't connected. What am I doing wrong?