Anthony Danes | DriverFinder - We Make Drivers Work for You - Part 8

How to disable driver signature enforcement in Windows 10

When device drivers are not available (yet) for Windows 10, you can often install drivers that are meant for Windows 8, or even Windows 7. In most cases that works without any problems, but in some cases you need to run the driver installer in compatibility mode. This can be achieved by right-clicking the installer. But when the driver does not install even when running the driver installer in compatibility mode, you might need to disable driver signature enforcement. Basically the driver signature ensures that the device driver is original and reliable, since it is guaranteed to originate from the manufacturer that put the signature on it.

But in some cases a signed driver is not available, or even the signed driver fails to install on Windows 10.

To disable the driver signature enforcement in Windows 10, follow these steps:

  1. Click the Start button in the taskbar.
  2. Click the Settings icon in the popup menu.
    Windows 10 Settings
  3. In the Settings window that comes up, click the option Update & Recovery option.Update & Recovery
    Note: You need to scroll down in the Settings window to see this option.
  4. Next, click the Recovery option.
  5. In the Recovery window that comes up, you need to click the Restart now button under the heading Advanced startup.
    Windows 10 Advanced Startup
  6. Once the PC has restarted, you will see a screen that says Choose an option. Here you click the Troubleshoot option.
    Windows 10 Troublsheet
  7. Under Troubleshoot you select Advanced options.
    Windows 10 Advanced Options
  8. Next, click the Startup Settings option, followed by the Restart button.
    Restart with Startup Settings
  9. After restarting a list with Startup Settings comes up. In the list you select option 7 to disable driver signature enforcement. You can either press the 7-key or use the function key F7 for this.
    Disable Driver Signature Enforcement
  10. Your PC will again need to restart, after which you can install the driver.

When installing the drivers, make sure to continue with the installation, even if Windows shows a warning regarding the unsigned drivers.

Searching for drivers for Windows 10? Download and use DriverFinder to find them!

List Drivers in Use on Windows

Using the Device Manager, you can easily check the details for each device on a Windows computer. But If you want list drivers in use by the system, the Device Manager is not suited for that.

However, in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10 you can create list of all device drivers in use by using a simple internal command.
To do this, first start a command prompt with administrator rights (right-click the command prompt icon and select Run as administrator in the popup menu).
Once the command prompt window opens type:

driverquery.exe /v /fo csv > c:\temp\driverlist.csv

This will instruct the command to list all drivers, and use the CSV output format. The greate-than symbol (>) is used to redirect the output of the command to the file specified (in this case driverlist.csv ). Make sure you include a path for the output file, otherwise the file will be stored in the default path of the command prompt (typically C:\Windows\System32 ).

For a full specification of the possible parameters for the driverquery command see the Microsoft website.

Now you can open the driverlist.csv file with Microsoft Excel (or any other program supporting comma-separated-values), and check the details of the drivers in one overview.

List Drivers in Use
MS Excel view of the resulting Windows driver list

Check the column named State to see if a driver is in use (Running), or not (Stopped).

The Path columns will show the location and file name of the actual driver file (.sys). Drivers that are included in the Windows installation typically will have C:\Windows\System32\ are the folder location, while additionally installed drivers will resider in C:\WINDOWS\system32\DriverStore\FileRepository\.

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