June 22nd, 2007
Update 2007.12.23 — These drivers are out of date. Find Boot Camp 2.0 drivers here.
Running Windows on a Macintosh is an eerie experience, but it allows me to do the things I just couldn’t do on a PowerPC Mac: playing games and UI testing at native speeds. As part of its Boot Camp package, Apple supplies a number of drivers which make running Windows on your Mac less of a headache.
Drivers and commentary relate to Windows XP SP2 32bit on a Santa-Rosa MacBook Pro 15".
Installing Boot Camp on Windows gives you driver support for your Mac’s hardware, various configuration utilities from hardware vendors and a target disk utility similar to the one found in the OS X system preferences. I had mentioned earlier that the program which installs these drivers and applications is in serious need of a redesign. While it absolves the user from the gruesome and painful task of driver installation, it makes no effort in identifying which hardware is actually present on the system. It just installs all drivers.
I have an nVidia graphics card; I really don’t need ATI graphics drivers installed on my system. Thanks.
After trying the conventional Boot Camp route I chose to trash the Windows installation and start from scratch. Instead of running the installer application Apple provides I did a manual install of the drivers for my system. This is tricky if you don’t know exactly what is physically inside your machine.
Here’s a run-down of the drivers1 I installed on this MacBook Pro:
Installs Apple-specific bluetooth support. Even though Windows will recognize bluetooth peripherals just fine without these packages installed. They also add a bluetooth preferences utility, which you can find in the Control Panel.
Enable proper trackpad support. The Composite Uninstaller, despite its cryptic name, also contains trackpad drivers.
Installs the Apple keyboard manager service, which allows you to use the volume, brightness and eject controls on your keyboard.
Installs DMA, memory and trusted platform module — otherwise known as TPM — drivers.
Installs infra-red remote support.
This latest revision MacBook Pro does not have proper iSight support in Boot Camp 1.3. The camera functions correctly - you can test it by going to the Scanners and Cameras entry under My Computer. It remains listed as an unknown in the device manager, however.
Wireless network card drivers. This model MacBook Pro has an Atheros 802.11 b/g/n card.
Sound card drivers. For some reason you also need to install a package from RealTek. This package installs the hardware vendor’s configuration application.
Intel chipset drivers. The MacBook Pro doesn’t have Intel ethernet or graphics chips, so don’t install those. Intel provides more recent versions of this driver on their 965m chipset page.
Ethernet drivers. Marvell provides more recent drivers versions for the YK51X86 card. You can find these on their driver page.
And finally…
These are the graphics drivers for the nVidia 8600m GT graphics accelerator. They’re pretty old, so you’ll probably want to update these if you’re going to be doing any gaming. nVidia does not seem to have a driver for this model, opting instead to have the vendor supply updated drivers. The LaptopVideo2Go forums do provide modified ForceWare drivers, though it requires a little modification - more details.
If that’s too much for you, download the modified drivers ready to go from here.