Lesson 3: Installing, Updating, and Troubleshooting Windows Vista Device Drivers

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When a user with administrative privileges attempts to install a driver signed by a publisher of

unknown trust, Windows Vista prompts the user, asking if he or she wants to install the driver

and add the publisher, as shown in Figure 1-18. If a driver lacks a valid signature or has been

altered, Windows Vista displays a strong warning against installing the driver, but a user with

administrative privileges can still install the software.

Figure 1-18 The warning that Windows Vista displays to a user with administrative privileges who

attempts to install a driver from an unknown publisher

Updating Drivers

Updating drivers is the process of replacing older drivers with more recent versions. Windows

Vista simplifies the process of updating drivers by making it almost the same process as the

one that you use to manually install drivers. Vendors update drivers in an attempt to remove

bugs and improve performance. Each hardware device driver has a version number, and

Windows Vista examines this version number when it attempts to determine whether a par-

ticular driver is an update of another driver. If you download a driver from a vendor’s website,

it might be more recent than the driver that is available through Windows Update. This might

occur because Microsoft puts drivers that appear on Windows Update through a further level

of testing after the vendor submits the driver for distribution.

If you have configured the Windows Update Driver Settings to never update drivers, you will have

to manually force an update. You will also need to force an update if you have obtained newer driv-

ers for a device if those drivers are not yet hosted on the Windows Update site. The process of

updating to drivers that you have downloaded from the Internet or which are stored on CD-ROM

is the same as the process for installing drivers by specifying the location of the folder that holds

them. This process was covered earlier in this chapter, in the section on installing drivers.

To manually update drivers from the Internet, perform the following steps:

■

In the Start menu, click Control Panel. If the Device Manager icon is not displayed, click

Classic View in the left side taskbar.

■

In Control Panel, double-click Device Manager. Click Continue to close the User

Account Control dialog box.