If you are like me and are running Vista x64 and are having some driver issues and would like to use the XP x64 drivers in Vista, but cannot because Vista expects the drivers to be signed, well then you can disable that.

Disclaimer: please use common sense and back up your data and don’t blame me if this breaks stuff.

Note 2: Using signed drivers is the recommended practice! I would resort to this only as a desperate measure (till all the drivers are released) or if you want to use it in a development scenario.

I won’t get into how attaching a kernel debugger disables this, but will point out the two other options available which most people will be using. 

  1. The first is using the “F8 option” when booking up and going into the “Advanced Boot Option” and then choosing the “Disable Driver Signature Enforcement”. This will disable the kernel signing enforcement for that boot session and of course is not persistent across the various boot sessions. This is ideal if you want to try one specific driver that one time.

  2. The other option is to modify the boot configuration using BCDedit (a.k.a Boot Configuration Data Editor). To run BCDedit you need to be running a command prompt with admin privileges. Here are some examples published by Microsoft on what you need to enter:

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// Disable enforcement – no signing checks  
Bcdedit.exe –set nointegritychecks ON

// Enable enforcement – signing checks apply  
Bcdedit.exe –set nointegritychecks OFF

// Disabling integrity check on an alternate OS  
// specified by a GUID for the system ID  
Bcdedit.exe –set {4518fd64-05f1-11da-b13e-00306e386aee} nointegritychecks ON

If you are not comfortable using BCDedit especially in a command prompt and are afraid you might screw something up, then check out EasyBSD - a GUI for BCDedit ( screen shots here ).

I should also point out I am not having any issues regarding Vista x64 drivers and everything works out of the box on my laptop.

More Info: Can be found here .