Originally posted by: ethebubbeth
My venerable Socket 939 DFI Nforce4 Ultra-D motherboard kicked the bucket and I am replacing with with an e3110 and ex38-ds4. I am wanting to switch to Vista x64 since I will have 4gb of ram and would like to have the option to upgrade beyond that.
However, my wireless card does not have WHQL signed drivers and I would like to avoid the purchase of another. I remember reading that after an update, there was no way to permanently disable the driver verification in Vista x64. Has that changed post SP1?
Thanks in advance for any assistance rendered.
I don't know if they changed anything relevant in SP1.
I will offer some relevant facts though:
0) I think signatures are only needed for KERNEL MODE drivers, not every single driver, so maybe your wireless card driver doesn't need to be signed anyway.
1) They don't have to be WHQL signed. AFAIK they just have to be *SIGNED, PERIOD* in a way that identifies the software with a signature that your system 'trusts'. So lots of manufacturers that don't go through WHQL certification still sign their drivers or whatever.
2) Because they just need to be signed by a signing process that your system trusts, I believe you can sign any old driver install *yourself* with a signature you just create on the spot if you want to but you'd have to import the signature certificate you generate to do that into your own system and tell it to trust that signature. So it should in theory work for your system, but if you sent the driver to someone else they wouldn't automatically recognize your signature so they'd have to import/trust your certificate in order for their system to accept the signature as valid.
** Of course if you pay some ridiculous amount you can get a certificate authority business to sell you a signing certificate that will let you sign stuff and have it automatically be accepted as a good signature by any PC since that certificate authority business is already listed as a trusted authority by windows default install.
3) You can also hit a key EVERY TIME YOU REBOOT when the booting is just starting to disable signature checking on drivers but then that doesn't take effect the next time you reboot so you'll have to manually hit the menu option to disable signature enforcement the next time you boot etc. I think hit F8 a few times just when it's about to boot until you get a menu and it'll be an option there.
4) Be sure to tell your hardware manufacturer that it sucks if they do not have the required / accepted signature on their Vista 64 kernel mode drivers.
5) Be sure to tell Microsoft that it sucks not to have control of your own PC and that you should be able to use unsigned drivers if you choose to and not have to be nagged about the decision on every boot!
