Windows 10 is not designed to allow you to control any aspect of the updates. You are forced to get them as Home users and as a Pro or Enterprise Edition user you can defer the update up to a few months; but they will be forcible installed at a later date. Because forcible installing drivers has cause numerous failures; Microsoft has developed an application that will allow you to hide updates so that they will not be installed (More info (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3073930)). Being that this is not a part of Windows 10; I imagine that Microsoft will either withdraw this application or cause it not to work in the future since that is the direction that the company seems to be going. BTW: It is not totally reliable due to the way you have to be really lucky to get it to work in some situations.
If you need to stop a driver from being installed it is always going to be after it gets installed and you find out it does not work. It is confusing on how to get this to work properly for I have done this with the graphics driver a few time before I got it to not install the Windows Update driver and use the driver I had installed after uninstalling the one Windows installed. BTW: this is an all or nothing approach, either you stop all drivers from being installed or you let them all be installed, but you can modify this behavior with the application and a lot of patience.
The real problem is when you uninstall the driver (choose
Delete the software too), Windows update will almost immediately want to re-install the driver. Now if you turn off the ability for Windows to install drivers (all drivers) you are safe but you will not find the driver in the hide driver list when you use the Hide Windows Updates software. So, now if you turn the ability to install drivers again then the driver you did not want to be install will automatically be installed again. It takes luck to run the Hide Updates Software at the right time to catch the driver in the list before it gets installed. Not exactly a great idea by Microsoft...
The procedure to install a driver that you want, instead of the Windows supplied driver:
- Open "System"
- Select "Advanced system settings"
- Go to the Hardware tab
- Select "Device Installation Settings"
- Select "No, let me choose what to do
- Select ""Never install driver software from Windows Update". The selection "Always install the best software from Windows Update" is there to confuse you.. It was already doing this, if you leave it like this you have changed nothing...
- Save Changes
- Open "Device Manager"
- Uninstall the driver that you do not want. Since we have instructed Windows Update not to install device drivers, the Windows supplied driver will not automatically be re-installed.
- Install the driver for the device that you want installed. DO NOT turn automatic Windows Update device driver install back on or your driver will be uninstalled and the Windows Driver will be re-installed. You can stop here if you are satisfied but if you are feeling gutsy keep going...
- Hide Windows Updates: This is where it gets tricky and frustrating. If you want to hide the device driver that you just uninstalled so that Windows Update will not attempt to re-install it. You would have to set driver updates back to Yes in the "Hardware" section of "System", then attempt to run the "Hide Windows Update Program" in an attempt to catch Windows Update downloading it so that it will show in the list so that you can select the driver and hide it from being installed.
- Uninstall the Windows Updated Driver an re-install your device driver (yes, again!)
- Windows Update for driver back on