great article keep it up

funny enough, I just bought a MS Habu mouse that doesn’t have drivers signed by MS. It is truly a sad day when you can’t afford to pay yourself to sign your own damn drivers.

Actually its sad that they make mice with so many functions you need a driver for it. I have a logitech wireless laser mouse with left button right button and scroll. I never install the drivers. My room mate has the gaming mouse. I’m like “dude, you use your mouse for normal windows things 99% of the time. You may as well have just adjusted your gaming style to a normal mouse and saved that money.” I’m conservative though. More of a keep everything close to stock and use built in apps over third party as much as possible.

I don’t think you can blame this all on the manufacturers. I have some specialized engineering software that uses a dongle. The software manufacture told me that he developed a 64 bit driver. However, Microsoft wants over $8000 for licensing to have the driver signed. This is very specialized software and economic times are hard. The manufacture simply doesn’t have a large enough customer base moving to Win 7 to justify the expenditure. From his perspective, this driver signature stuff has nothing to do with security and everything to do with Microsoft extracting $$$ from software developers.

Good point, but as with anything, there are exceptions to every rule. For the most part the vendors drop the ball. Most general users probably aren’t using the specialized hardware, which is why the company can’t afford to pay the price, which the price is probably at that level to discourage people who make crappy hardware and drivers from being able to easily certify it as well. At the same time, I’m surprised there isn’t some MS plan to help small business. They like making partners more than enemies.

If Microsoft were TRULY interested in driver security, it would make the digital signatures for drivers available for free for manufactuers and software developers (perhaps a one time nominal fee of $50 or $100 for processing would not out of the question). But that does NOT seem to be the case here.

The same issue occurred before with the Win95/Win98 software logos. A slow and expensive path was created by Microsoft to “ensure” software compatibility with Windows95 and the permission to use the Win95 logo. For really big companies with a large user base (think gaming software as an example), this was a marketing advantage. For small software companies, it was not worth the time or the money.

Not to be fussy but there is also alot of *free* opensource software out there and I do like to use it. One in particular FreeOTFE. It is an encryption tool that has unsigned drivers since they are freeware they are not going to get them signed so there is a big dent in Microsft’s system. I would like to use this software personally but will probably have to use Windows XP now.

There is no opensource software worth missing out on Windows 7. Trust me. Not only that but XP is legacy, meaning support will go away eventually and virus and malware groups will have a field day with an OS that doesn’t get any patches. But on another level, if you had opensource software you could either use ready driver plus, which allows you to use unsigned drivers, or just run the app in XP mode, though you probably can’t run a VM if you still have XP hardware. It probably isn’t fast enough and doesn’t have CPU virtualization. That’s another point to make. Unsigned drivers is even a problem in XP if you use 64 bit. If you ever plan on using more than 3 gigs of memory, you’ll need 64 bit Windows. I really don’t get why people are scared to adopt new technology. To me the things XP won’t do always far outweighed any problems I had in Vista. Just being able to use the start menu search to run apps is worth it.

I’d like to reiterate what others have commented in regards to the flaws

in this MS’ forced driver signing.
Turantual, Sven & Sparky all point out very Big issues with this

execution of said “ideology”.
Important to note is that these issues arnt “exceptions” or “dents”..

they are Huge holes in the process.
What Young & the Article writer seem not to realize is that this

‘ideology’ is just an excuse MS uses to extort more money from it’s

consumers as turantual clearly pointed out.
I also see MS using this to suppress freeware developers in an attempt

to force everything thing that runs on Windows to have the OK stamp from

Big-Brother in order to better control the markets. Just like Xbox &

Halo 2 being “vista only”. Which I got to work perfectly fine under XP

using ‘work-arounds’.

Ever try plugging a thumb-drive into an Xbox to copy your save games?

Back to the point at hand though…Take a look at that URL I listed, it’s another great example of what’s truly going on.
It’s also a link for a work-around for this whole signing problem rather then an unacceptable, single-session allotment.

Also, I’d like to point out to Young that Vista is, in fact, built on XP. Ever seen Longhorn? Vista was just another Cash-Cow technique and turned out MUCH LIKE WinME. I’m old enough to remember WinME and Vista behaves like it’s offspring. Less stability & features full of headaches. There is GOOD REASON why the Corporate world SKIPPED Vista entirely. They are now moving form XP Pro 2600 right to Win7.. probably 7600RTM.
I myself stayed with XP-2600 32-bit till Win7. Rather than opening a new bag of worms, I liked the ones I was familer with fixing. And 64-bit WinXP was a COMPLETE TRAIN-WRECK. nothing worked right. I suspect it was just an excuse by MS for manufactures to buy more windows and pay for more Driver-Signing.

As pleased as I am with many improvements Win7 has FINALLY MADE(like they couldn’t have done this 4 years ago?); I am very upset at the removal of several Key features(QuickLaunchBar!) and other things that affect my freedom-of-use. I now seem to be combating with What I want to do and what Win7 ALLOWS me to do. Almost like im using a MacOS! ;P

It is my hope that this loquacious Comment of mine will help to enlighten ppl in some small way to the slow, but steady, decline that is killing both PC gaming and freedom.
Same thing is happening with our gun-rights..soon the average citizen will no longer have the power to stand against the tyrants from taking over this country through use of Law-enforcement to enact Socalist/Communist agendas; all in the name of the greater-good “ideology”. Just as MS does with their ‘good’ ‘ideologies’.
THink about it… It all ties in. These are the most powerful ppl on the planet in the most powerful country.. you dont think they are in cahoots?

….
Good luck and God Bless.

http://www.ngohq.com/news/16379-antivirus-suites-block-dseo.html

You don’t like Microsoft for whatever reason. That’s fine. But don’t hate because Microsoft wants to suppress some of the poorly designed software that is the reason Apple controls developers so tightly. As for Vista being XP, wow. Do a little research. Vista was a big step forward, which is why there were bugs early on and haters such as yourself decided to stick with old technology. 2000 was the major upgrade from 98 which had bugs and driver issues, and led to XP which was the minor update fixed things. Vista is the major upgrade from XP which had bugs and driver issues, and led to Windows 7 which blew everything previous out of the water. Seriously though, if you hate Microsoft so much you should probably save up and buy a Mac. If you are a power user though, even Me had its merits and I’d always rather have the newer technology than stick with the old. There are always features that help out a lot.

As for driver signing, who cares. You have the rules, you either play by them or you bitch and complain on blog posts because you don’t know how to just find a workaround and live in peace.

As for XP in the workplace, your employer just isn’t very forward thinking. At mine we’ve migrated to Vista since its inception on about 8,000 computers at 1,600 plus about 1,500 at our two headquarters. We’ve been pushing back the date, but as of now XP will be completely phased out by 2012. And even better we’re supporting Windows 7 this summer and lots of people are jumping the gun and getting there own Windows 7 boxes which we then have to tell them to return for Vista Business.

To everyone…Why is it that Internet commenters ONLY go places to post negative responses. People are cold hearted.

Driver signing doesn’t mean a whole lot anyway. Just look at the change log for various driver updates. How often do they contain “BSOD fixed under such an such event” We find this particularly with the USB drivers we use in our products.
Another problem is the manufacturer fixes a bug and thinks well we’ve got several more fixes left to sort lets wait to fix them before paying for driver signing. So consumers are forced to wait for fixes unnecessarily.
e have to edit the .inf files for signed drivers to have them work with our unique USB PID numbers and to include our company name, this does not effect the driver stability but they become unsigned as a result. We cannot afford to sign them especially when we don’t know if the drivers we edit are going to have bugs and be replaced at any moment, because even though they are signed they still manage to regularly crash windows.

Good stuff. This driver signing issue is really a non issue now due to a piece of freeware called ready driver plus which intercepts the boot process to make Windows bootup with Driver signing enforcement disabled. Then again, that defeats the whole purpose of driver signing. It’s kind of like disabling UAC. Everyone complained about XP being insecure so they came up with UAC to make it more secure and the first thing people did was complain and disable it.