I was asked to sort out why a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon was not allowing a user to log in using his domain credentials.  It was throwing an error claiming that the AD server was not available.

This is somewhat normal as the first time a user logs into our domain they are often required to connect via wire.  Let’s ignore why that is the case and just accept it for now.  The problem is, however, the Carbon lacks an Ethernet port.

Ah, but we have plenty of those Apple USB –> Ethernet adapters.  I’ll just attach one of those.

That was fine.  It even showed correctly identified in the Device Manager.  The driver install failed silently and the device was accompanied by the usual yellow triangle of shame.  So I right-clicked on the device and asked it to install the driver.  It failed with a useless error message which I haven’t bothered to record into my memory.

Turns out you can’t install this driver (which Windows either includes or retrieves from Microsoft—I didn’t load it on myself) because it is an “unsigned” driver.  Do you see the problem here?  Windows downloads a driver from Microsoft (or the OS comes with the driver in a CAB somewhere) but what it downloads it doesn’t trust.  That’s like me not trusting what I have in my pocket: it looks very much like my house key but I just can’t be sure.

Anyway, who cares if they are bumblers.  You just want to know how to solve the problem.  I took the following steps from this site.

1. Either roll your mouse to the lower-right corner and click the Settings icon or hit Windows-I.
2. Click “Change PC Settings” (or similar) at the bottom of that Settings side-bar.
3. Under PC Settings click General.
4. Scroll to the bottom on the right-hand pane and click the “Restart now” button under “Advanced startup”.  (This doesn’t reboot “now”.  There are more steps.)
5. On the “Choose an option” menu which follows choose “Troubleshoot”.
6. On the “Troubleshoot” menu choose “Advanced options”.
7. On the “Advanced options” menu choose “Startup Settings”.
8. On the “Startup Settings” menu click the “Restart” button.  (This will reboot your system.)
9. On this (totally different) “Startup Settings” menu choose 7 (literally type a 7).

This will reboot your system with “driver signature enforcement” disabled.  This should allow you to install the driver (by right-clicking in the Device Manager).

Once you have done that you can merely reboot to re-enable that, er, feature.  (The page linked above also includes instructions for disabling this permanently.  I have not tested this, nor would I consider it a wise maneuver.  To be sure Microsoft would consider it not recommended.)

Isn’t WinAte fun?  Oh, let’s call it WinAin’t.

(In all fairness, Win8 does seem to perform better than any previous version of Windows.  It’s just that you have to contend with that shitty interface.  Seriously, seven menus deep?)