Installing older drivers on windows 8

Darren Wright

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I ran across this info trying to install some development drivers for a device I own. The drivers were for windows vista 64 bit and I needed to install them on my windows 8 64 bit laptop. They've installed fine on my Windows 7 64 bit, but was prompted that the drivers were not digitally signed. However windows 7 just prompts you and asks if you want to install them anyway. Well for windows 8 that wasn't the case, the install just failed. Here are the steps I followed to get them to install....


So, one of the big issues I've had with the Windows 8 is that Microsoft forces you to use Digitally Signed Drivers (this isn't new, as Windows 7 requires them as well).


This is a problem for anyone who needs to install an unsigned driver to support their device. Fortunately, there is a workaround.


To get started:


From the Metro Start Screen, open Settings (move your mouse to the bottom-right-corner of the screen and wait for the pop-out bar to appear, then click the Gear icon).
Click "More PC Setting".
Click "General".
Scroll down, and click "Restart now" under "Advanced startup".
Wait a bit.
Click "Troubleshoot".
Click "Advanced Options"
Click "Windows Startup Settings"
Click Restart.




When your computer restarts, select "Disable driver signature enforcement" from the list. After windows loads you can load your driver. You may need to right click your installer and select "Run as Administrator" when you run it. Reboot again once the driver is installed and all will be well.

Do remember that if your drivers are for 32 bit you need to have a 32 bit operating system to install them to, like wise for 64 bit will only install for a 64 bit operating system.
 
Thanks Darren that's something I was really wanting to know, not that I have win8 but about the digitally signed driver work around. Good old MS is now trying to act like big brother. Take me back to win 2000 please. :rofl: At least we had control then. :)
 
I bet that was annoying to figure out. Question, Could you have run a virtual machine of Vista 64 and installed the drivers there?
 
I bet that was annoying to figure out. Question, Could you have run a virtual machine of Vista 64 and installed the drivers there?

From my experience with other devices, the host needs to recognize the device (in this case a USB device) to be able to activate it to share within the guest OS. One device in particular I could see the generic system name given without being able to load drivers on the host, but when the guest OS tried to load drivers for it, it crashed the guest machine.
 
Still haven't had any hands-on with Windows 8 yet. After many years of being on the bleeding edge of NT-based operating systems since the original Windows NT, I'm kind of enjoying hanging back a version or so and waiting until I really have a compelling reason to upgrade. Aside from driver hassles, what is your impression of Windows 8?
 
Still haven't had any hands-on with Windows 8 yet. After many years of being on the bleeding edge of NT-based operating systems since the original Windows NT, I'm kind of enjoying hanging back a version or so and waiting until I really have a compelling reason to upgrade. Aside from driver hassles, what is your impression of Windows 8?

I wish I had stuck with Windows 7. I guess the one pain is the Windows Metro UI is just awful, even with a touch screen on the laptop. The main annoyance with the metro ui is there is no taskbar or integrations with pre-windows 8 apps. So if I have google talk running and I'm on the Metro UI, I won't see any pop-ups or get any indication that someone wants to chat. You also have no easy way of knowing what is open unless you swipe the side bar to show what's in the background.

I don't even run any windows 8 apps if I can keep from it. I bought and installed the Start8 start button program, it adds the start button back with all of the same windows 7 options . It also has a feature to have it boot up to the desktop mode so I runs as much like Windows 7 as possible. The windows keyboard button will allow you to toggle over to the metro UI or I can swipe my screen on the right side to show the settings pane if I need to quickly get to something.
 
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