Preventing automatic driver update

duinsel

New Member
Messages
5
Hi,

I had a (known) problem affecting the use of Enterprise Wifi networks. Long story short, the solution is to downgrade drivers to a lower OS level. I manually installed Vista drivers for my WiFi, problem solved.

Enter Win8 x64 automatic driver updates. After reboot or after some time, my Vista driver is automagicallly replaced with the default driver for my card (Atheros AR 9285), and my connection can no longer be authenticated and is dropped.

I tried disabling automatic driver search through windows update, but the newer driver is already bundled on my system. Thus the new driver is still installed. I can't easily delete the driver, as the filenames in c:\windows\system32\drivers are the same for both versions and they overwrite each other; I don't know where the newer copy is stored as well, a copy of it must live in some additional path as well, as does some inf file that comes with Win8.

Does anyone know of a way to lock a particular driver version in place? I don't mind automatic driver updates in general, but I'd like Win8 not to touch my WiFi drivers, at least not until the root cause in the latest drivers has been fixed.

Thanks,

Martijn
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win8 64bit
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Sony Vaio VPCCW2S1E
    CPU
    Core i5
    Memory
    4

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    64-bit Windows 10
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Custom self built
    CPU
    Intel i7-8700K OC'd to 5 GHz
    Motherboard
    ASUS ROG Maximus XI Formula Z390
    Memory
    64 GB (4x16GB) G.SKILL TridentZ RGB DDR4 3600 MHz (F4-3600C18D-32GTZR)
    Graphics Card(s)
    ASUS ROG-STRIX-GTX1080TI-O11G-GAMING
    Sound Card
    Integrated Digital Audio (S/PDIF)
    Monitor(s) Displays
    2 x Samsung Odyssey G7 27"
    Screen Resolution
    2560x1440
    Hard Drives
    1TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2,
    4TB Samsung 990 PRO PRO M.2,
    8TB WD MyCloudEX2Ultra NAS
    PSU
    OCZ Series Gold OCZZ1000M 1000W
    Case
    Thermaltake Core P3
    Cooling
    Corsair Hydro H115i
    Keyboard
    Logitech wireless K800
    Mouse
    Logitech MX Master 3
    Internet Speed
    1 Gb/s Download and 35 Mb/s Upload
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    Internet Explorer 11
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    Malwarebyte Anti-Malware Premium
    Other Info
    Logitech Z625 speaker system,
    Logitech BRIO 4K Pro webcam,
    HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdn,
    APC SMART-UPS RT 1000 XL - SURT1000XLI,
    Galaxy S23 Plus phone
Thanks for your tip Shawn. I gave it a spin.



That was already set by me, but I double-checked




I am not offered the tickbox to delete driver software for this device. Note that these are not drivers that I downloaded, but they came bundled with the windows install, either on disk or pulled from windows update. Perhaps it is not allowed to remove them?

Uninstall thus only removes the device, and after scan hardware it reappears, including the offending driver



  • Reinstall the Vista driver
I did just that manually, until the next reboot that is.

Perhaps I'll try and make the right driver read only in c:\windows\system32\drivers, see if that helps..
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win8 64bit
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Sony Vaio VPCCW2S1E
    CPU
    Core i5
    Memory
    4
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