Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Make Windows 10 stop installing driver software automatically


I've upgraded my PC from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 10 Pro; overall it seems to be working fine, with small bugs here and there. One thing that I find really annoying is that Windows seems to think it is OK to install drivers and vendor-specific control panels for me.


I've always installed drivers manually to get around having all the bloatware (i.e., Realtek's audio management panels and other vendor-specific tweaking tools).


How do I stop Windows from automatically installing bloat on my custom PC, so that I can use the drivers I've exported from packages and binaries to get around bloats?


If I uninstall everything Windows automatically installed, it seems as if a reboot persists them and installs again.


Preferably I'd like to perform a clean install and have Windows skip installing any drivers automatically. Is this possible?


Answer



After 2 hours of angry web searching, I posted this question. And of course the next search I did yielded the answer I was looking for;


Note: Make sure your windows upgrade has been activated before you perform a clean installation!


Performing a clean installation with the Windows 10 ISO with the network cable disconnected seems to be the way to go. After first boot one have to disable this feature by;



  1. Open File explorer (Win+E)

  2. Right click "This PC" and select properties

  3. Click "Advanced system settings" and select "Hardware" tab

  4. Click "Device Installation Settings"

  5. Select "No, let me choose what to do" and check "Never install driver software from Windows Update"

  6. Reconnect your network cable


Windows will be activated sometime after you connect the network cable again.


Hope this helps others too, and save hours of anger in search for a solution.


No comments:

Post a Comment

hard drive - Leaving bad sectors in unformatted partition?

Laptop was acting really weird, and copy and seek times were really slow, so I decided to scan the hard drive surface. I have a couple hundr...