There are
two (yes,
two, no more no less) official ways to disable the driver signing enforcement on Windows Vista/7 x64.
- When booting, press "F8", then select to boot the OS with driver signing disabled. This will only work for the current session, at the next reboot driver signing enforcement is turned on again. Using this allows you to load any driver, no matter if it's signed or not or if the signature is invalid.
- Run a command prompt with admin rights and execute "bcdedit /set testsigning on". This will enable TESTSIGNING mode every time you boot. In this mode you will be able to load any signed driver, but the signature doesn't need to be trusted by Microsoft, so you can sign the driver with any certificate, even self-signed ones. In Vista BETA there was one testsigning certificate included with the SDK for this, but release versions of Vista will load all signed drivers, not just the ones with this special certificate. You will get a message that you're running in testsigning mode on your destop. There are some patchers available which remove this message.
Any other hack/patch/exploit is just that: a hack, patch or exploit and will be fixed by Microsoft very soon or just stop working since Microsoft fixes something else and the patch offsets/data change.
Most of the patches I have seen put Windows in "setup mode", in which Windows disables not just the driver signing enforcement, but also Kernel Patch Protection. One additional problem is that applications asking for the installed Windows type will not get "workstation" or "server" any more, but "setup". So you can't install or run most system software (anti-virus, firewalls, defragmentation, backup, ...) any more, since they expect to be installed on a Windows type they are licensed for.
And of course any way of disabling the driver signing enforcement will create major security risks on your computer.