December 23rd, 2007
I’ve had a look at Boot Camp 1.3 drivers, the 1.4 drivers, and a more up-to-date nVidia 8600M GT driver. These articles have been very popular, and I have been meaning to have a look at Apple’s latest release of Boot Camp realese. After a couple of days playing with Leopard, Boot Camp, and the driver package Apple has shipped, it’s time to have a look at what they put into the first non-beta release of Boot Camp.
Drivers and commentary relate to Windows XP SP2 32bit on a Santa-Rosa MacBook Pro 15".
UPDATE: This nVidia driver is out of date. I have made a newer version available.
Apple still ships a disappointingly out-of-date nVidia driver for the MacBook Pro’s 8600M GT. The latest nVidia reference driver — at the time of writing — is 169.21. Apple ships version 101.34. It’s not a bad driver, but it was released in May 2007, so you’ll be missing out on some of the latest tweaks and enhancements.
To save everyone the trouble of manually assembling a newer driver, I’ve used laptopvideo2go.com’s modified .inf file to provide a more up-to-date driver:
If you have trouble with the above driver you can try an older, more stable version. Ignore any missing file warnings during installation.
What’s changed with the other drivers? First of all, with OS X.5, Apple has made access to the Boot Camp driver package more difficult. You’re required to use your original OS X installation DVD, which has both a Mac-only and a PC-only data layer. Insert the DVD into your Mac while it’s running OS X and you’ll see the OS X specific data, and vice-versa with Windows. If you, like me, prefer having the DVD as a .dmg on your Mac, you’ll have trouble getting at the Boot Camp drivers after you install Windows.
Other than that, not much has changed since Boot Camp 1.4. Here are the Apple-specific drivers:
Other non-Apple drivers:
Wireless network card drivers. This model MacBook Pro has an Atheros 802.11 b/g/n card. Remains at version 6.0.3.94 (26/06/2007).
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. Included is an updated version 8.0.0.1010 (16/05/2006).
Ethernet drivers. Marvell provides more recent drivers versions for the YK51X86 card. You can find these on their driver page. Remains at version 10.12.7.3 (23/03/2007).
Sound card drivers. These SigmaTel drivers remains at version 5.10.5185.0 (22/08/2006) and the RealTek driver has been updated to version 5.10.0.5469 (20/08/2007).