{"id":580,"date":"2009-11-10T12:31:56","date_gmt":"2009-11-10T12:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/?p=580"},"modified":"2009-11-10T09:56:51","modified_gmt":"2009-11-10T09:56:51","slug":"windows-7-device-installation-without-administrator-privileges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/11\/10\/windows-7-device-installation-without-administrator-privileges\/","title":{"rendered":"Windows 7 Device Installation without Administrator Privileges"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Supporting mobile workers is always a little tricky.\u00a0 Whilst you need them to be able to work effectively, you don\u2019t always want to grant them enough system access that they can break things whilst on the other side of the world where you can\u2019t help them.<\/p>\n<p>One of the big requirements for administrative access to systems is the ability to install new devices such as printers.\u00a0 Windows has supported non-admin installation of drivers for years, but with the big caveat that the drivers are signed.\u00a0 If they\u2019re not then it won\u2019t work, and often the manufactures don\u2019t bother going through the time and expense.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately Windows 7 offers some help here by allowing you to point the system at Windows Update for driver installations.\u00a0 When a device is plugged in Windows will check for appropriate drivers on the local disk (these can of course be pre-populated) and then if it can\u2019t find any search Windows Update.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve tested it with a few devices here, and whilst not everything is on Windows Update, it would seem that the majority of newer printers and devices are.\u00a0 At the very least it\u2019s a huge expansion of the drivers included out-the-box.<\/p>\n<p>You can also search the <a title=\"Windows Update catalog\" href=\"http:\/\/catalog.update.microsoft.com\/v7\/site\/home.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Windows Update catalog<\/a> so check whether certain devices are covered, and download those drivers manually.\u00a0 I\u2019ve not tried it, but I suspect that might also be useful should only Vista drivers be available.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/image.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/image_thumb.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"image\" width=\"450\" height=\"321\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Anyway, so how do you set this up?\u00a0 Well there are two Group Policies that you need to set:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Computer Configuration &gt; Policies &gt; Administrative Templates &gt; System &gt; Device Installation &gt;\u00a0 <strong>Specify search order for device driver installation source locations = Enabled: Search Windows Update Last<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>This tells Windows to search locally for drivers, then search Windows Update for a compatible driver if none are found<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Computer Configuration &gt; Policies &gt; Administrative Templates &gt; System &gt; Driver Installation &gt; <strong>Turn off Windows Update device driver search prompt = Enabled<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>This removes the choice for an administrator to specify searching Windows Update and sets Windows to search Windows Update by default (given the search order specified above).\u00a0 If this isn\u2019t set the user is prompted to enter administrative credentials before searching Windows Update<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Windows 7 Group Policy allows you to use Windows Update to install devices and printers without the need for administrator privilages or finding signed device drivers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[346,347,61,348,13,179],"class_list":["post-580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","category-work","tag-device","tag-driver","tag-group-policy","tag-installation","tag-microsoft","tag-windows-7","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":581,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions\/581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}