New
#1
Getting 'old' drivers to work in W10
I am a volunteer at an all volunteer non profit (Phoenix Computers - Reclaim, Refurbish, Reuse) that refurbishes computers to provide to low income families. We have been doing this since 2009 and are part of the MRR program with Microsoft.
We take donated computers, wipe the drives and install the OS. We started out with XP and moved to W7 when XP was no longer supported and use the sysprep method for installing Windows.As you can imagine, the computers that we get are not the 'latest and greatest', although we do get a fair share of nice ones. In the past, installing drivers for older hardware has been the challenge, although we have managed to get virtually all hardware working on Windows 7, using drivers as old as those from Win2000. For those drivers that are not set up for W7, we would simply unzip the driver file and point the device that is missing the driver to the .inf file contained within the driver file. 99% of the time it works just fine for any device.
We have now moved to W10 and for a few drivers, that technique is not now working. It begins to install but then throws an error near the end of the installation that states the driver is not for the current operating system - similar to the error one would get when running the setup.exe file for a driver from Win XP in W7.
Is it possible that W10 must have signed drivers to install or is W10 more closely examining the driver file?If this problem can't be resolved we will end up with a lot of computers unusable on W10.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.