Hack #84. Please Continue Anyway
You've seen the dialog box shown in Figure 8-9 pop up during a new driver installation: "The software you are installing for this hardware: Some Cool Device has not passed Windows Logo testing to verify its compatibility with Windows XP..." Yikes! It's enough to scare you out of hooking anything up to your PC.
Figure 8-9. Windows Logo certification warning dialog
To solve this problem, locate and download a Windows-certified driver from the vendor's web site, assuming one is available. The risk of not doing so is minimal, but using a certified driver removes an element of potential surprise and disaster that may appear later on. Certified drivers will often be flagged with the words "WHQL Certified," as shown in Figure 8-10.
Figure 8-10. nVidia's driver feature web page listing WHQL certification
The warning dialog appears because the driver installation package did not come with a digital certificate that matches the one in Windows to let the installation process know the file was tested by a Microsoft-approved lab.
The intention is good: vendors have someone who knows the Windows environment very well review their drivers to ensure they are not consuming all the memory, stealing resources, or overwriting operating system files or other applications' files, ...
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