Windows 7: How to stop installing drivers???

Whenever I plug in and external drive Windows installs the drivers. I'm constanly having to do driver clean ups in order for it to see my external drive. I already have device installation settings ticked to never install drivers and it makes no difference. I have 7 home edition so I can't access gpedit. I feel like I've got a Mac! There has to be a fix for this, anyone?

Hello pastafrolla,

Disabling "Found new hardware" may help to stop this.

"Found New Hardware" Balloons - Enable or Disable

Hope this helps,

Shawn

Thanks Brink, will give it a shot. It stops the balloon but not the driver installation. There has to be a fix for this nuisance.

Start -> Computer Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Hardware -> Device Installation Settings

Drivers - Turn Off Automatic Driver Installation

I feel your pain too.

Thanks, already did that before I posted this, it makes no difference, still installing drivers. The most painful part is that I can't access gpedit. What's the point of that?

Weird. I just did it before and it prevents it grabbing drivers from Windows Update. Now that I think about it... I imagine that it would not help if the driver is already in the system folder or on the external you plug in though...

Go re-install the driver, and purge it from your system via Device Manager (tick option to delete driver when removing the device). That should remove existing drivers.

However I can tell you though that enabling the GP did not help me, as it still seemed to auto-install (it was hard to tell if it was the installation wizard or the system noticing drivers were missing)... but prevented manual installations of drivers. Exactly what I did not want.

There may be a GP I missed though.

Best of luck. Sorry I couldn't help more.

Auto drivers saves so much time... except when the offered driver is incompatible. I wish there was a nice way to blacklist certain drivers.

Flash drives shouldn't have drivers being installed every single time they are plugged in, it's really ridiculous. I had to install team viewer to transfer files instead of using a flash drive which is much faster, total pain. I'm installing a virtual machine with XP Pro, I've had it with 7 and constantly having to install programs to make it do what XP did. Thanks for trying to help appreciate it.