Why does Vista insist on installing the wrong drivers?

[Peter]

I just had to format and reinstall Vista because I stupidly paid no
attention to Vista wanting to install a driver for my Motorola Bluetooth
dongle. If I'd noticed that it was "Broadcom" instead of "Widcomm" I might
not have ended up with a frozen login screen.
So I formatted/reinstalled...failed at the last minute, BSOD, ATI drivers in
infinite loop, blah blah. I read online that Vista insists on installing
the wrong drivers for ATI X1600 series cards.
I swapped the graphics card for my old Radeon 9550 and finally got a
succesful installation. According to what I had read online I should then
have been able to swap for my X1650 card - but no, Vista installed RVE250
drivers (never heard of it) the split second I signed in and the system
became unbootable, BSOD yet again. Thank God for XP otherwise I wouldn't
be able to get help at all.
So now I'm stuck with my old graphics card, which although it does give Aero
etc. gives me a much lower rating plus less of my 4gb memory is now seen by
Windows.....a thousand curses on you Microsoft!! I always used to stick up
for MSFT but I am very quickly becoming disillusioned by what I regard as
sloppy system design.
No system should force drivers on you until you have given permission for
them to be installed.

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate fully updated
P4 D865GBFL HT @ 3.0ghz 4.0gb DDR 700gb HD
Sapphire Radeon X1650 Pro Graphics
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 Audio

 

[Mr. Arnold]

I swapped the graphics card for my old Radeon 9550 and finally got a
succesful installation. According to what I had read online I should then
have been able to swap for my X1650 card - but no, Vista installed RVE250
drivers (never heard of it) the split second I signed in and the system
became unbootable, BSOD yet again.

So, if you saw that the wrong driver was installed, why didn't you stop at
that point, downloaded the correct driver from its site, went to Device
Manager and installed the correct driver manually, before you re-booted the
machine?

 

[Don]

I just had to format and reinstall Vista because I stupidly paid no
attention to Vista wanting to install a driver for my Motorola Bluetooth
dongle. If I'd noticed that it was "Broadcom" instead of "Widcomm" I might
not have ended up with a frozen login screen.
So I formatted/reinstalled...failed at the last minute, BSOD, ATI drivers in
infinite loop, blah blah. I read online that Vista insists on installing
the wrong drivers for ATI X1600 series cards.
I swapped the graphics card for my old Radeon 9550 and finally got a
succesful installation. According to what I had read online I should then
have been able to swap for my X1650 card - but no, Vista installed RVE250
drivers (never heard of it) the split second I signed in and the system
became unbootable, BSOD yet again. Thank God for XP otherwise I wouldn't
be able to get help at all.
So now I'm stuck with my old graphics card, which although it does give Aero
etc. gives me a much lower rating plus less of my 4gb memory is now seen by
Windows.....a thousand curses on you Microsoft!! I always used to stick up
for MSFT but I am very quickly becoming disillusioned by what I regard as
sloppy system design.
No system should force drivers on you until you have given permission for
them to be installed.

So I gather you can now boot okay with your old graphics card. What
about booting into safe mode and deleting the incorrect RVE250 drivers
from C:\windows\inf and C:\windows\system32\DriverStore? (Of course,
you wouldn't let Vista search the internet for an upgrade.)

BTW, it sounds like you got Vista installed correctly at least once
before your Bluetooth disaster, am I right? You must have the correct
drivers somewhere, then?

 

[Peter]

I did, but somehow it screwed the system up. The strange thing is I
reinstalled Vista a couple of time before this and nothing untoward
happened. It looks like Vista looks for the wrong driver during the
installation process. I'm unwilling to tell the installer not to search for
upgrades as this could cause other problems, or is that not the case?
When I first booted into Vista I went straight to System protection and
turned of automatic hardware updating, but Vista still insisted on
installing them.

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate fully updated
P4 D865GBFL HT @ 3.0ghz 4.0gb DDR 700gb HD
Sapphire Radeon X1650 Pro Graphics
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 Audio

 

[Peter]

Don, right now no I don't have Vista installed at all. I'll try it
tomorrow. I have the old card installed now. If I recall Vista tried to
install the drivers anyway, even though I'd set it not to recognise any new
hardware. Weird. Yes I'd done this several times before without incident
and with the newer card in. There must be something amiss with MSFT's Vista
driver list online, that's all I can say.
I'm grateful for the location of the drivers. I'll keep that in mind for
future reference.

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate fully updated
P4 D865GBFL HT @ 3.0ghz 4.0gb DDR 700gb HD
Sapphire Radeon X1650 Pro Graphics
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 Audio