Make (some) old drivers compatible with Windows 8
If you are like me, you just NEED to try out new bits as soon as you can get your hands on them. Yesterday the Windows 8 Developer Preview was released to public and many of my co-workers and friends tested like hell.
As I don’t have so many spare computers at home and I do not want to buy a tablet just yet, I chose my 6 year old Dell Latitude D510 to be the first Windows 8 Client machine I own. The problem already sticks out of my last sentence: the age. Of course, there is no driver support for any OS above Windows XP. Luckily, Windows 7 only couldn’t find a driver for graphics and sound. Quite essential, eh? But luckily Dell still had all drivers for download which worked just fine.
Windows 8 does not seem to be so kind and rejects both drivers. That does not make a very good notebook, don’t you think? So I remembered that Win8 downloaded a WLAN driver via Windows Update and I took a look it it’s driver .inf. One line immediately got my attention: “Compatible = 1″ in the [Version] section. So I copied it to both other drivers and … one, the one for the sound, actually worked. It invalidated the drivers’ signature but well, that’s not a surprise, is it? The sound worked fine.
The video driver still does not like to be installed and I am working on a way to bend the rules for this one as well.
I hope this could help you guys a little. Have fun testing!
Tags: Compatibility, Developer Preview, Driver, Windows 8
