Vista - having to reinstall audio driver after every reboot

Hello All,

I have a problem, well more of an inconvenience, The laptop I am running Vista 32 bit on uses an old audio driver which does not have a Vista equivalent. The audio works fine after installing the driver, and I do not have any issues running the driver on Vista. My problem is after rebooting the system I have to go into my device manager and reinstall the drivers to get the audio working again, I have to do this every time I need to reboot. So my question is; is there a way to get Vista to install this driver automatically while booting up or is there a folder I can place the files in so it never needs to be reinstalled and it becomes a persistent driver? I hope this makes sense.

Thank you for any and all help.

Kineo

Hi Kineo and welcome to Vista Forums

What is the make and model of your laptop?

It is a pretty old laptop, MicronPC Transport GX3, it has ESS audio. I know it's not really the best laptop to install Vista on but it works great for me. Thank you for the welcome.

Because it is not a signed driver, Vista is going to make you do this every time - on boot it checks for unsigned drivers and disables them. This is a known limitation and there is no work around for it, unfortunately.

That being said, I have to say, before RealTek got really popular, ESS used to make some pretty decent onboard sound chipsets...

I appreciate the answer, if the driver is a signed driver for XP would it still work? Or is there a different signing certificate for each OS? If that is the case then I will remain slightly inconvenienced. With an older laptop I did not believe I would have an easy time finding all the driver that are compatible with Vista so I am satisfied.

thank you again for everyone's help.

Kineo