cross-platform – Page 8 – Chris F Carroll

BootCamp Drivers direct download—further help

If you've downloaded bootcamp drivers for Macs to run Windows 7 or 8, but still have problems, here's my summary of the main issues and solutions I know of:

The download file won't open; or it doesn't seem to work somehow; or doesn't contain all the drivers you expect Do the download again using a download manager because sometimes the download appears to finish but hasn't really. There are a couple of download managers I know of for OS X:

Folx by Eltima, who have been doing Mac software for years

iGetter has been working well for a decade
You get an error message saying that the drivers can't be installed on this computer model.In this case you may have one of 3 problems:
1. You clicked the wrong download link. Check the instructions on finding your ModelIdentifier again carefully, and try again.
2. Some Macs only get drivers for 32-bit versions of Windows and some only get drivers for 64-bit versions of Windows so if you install the wrong one, you'll have to start again.
  - Older models don't support 64 bit Windows.
    - Consult Apple's list at this page from Apple from June 2012.
    - See if this page helps: Michael Anastasiou : BootCamp x64 is unsupported on this computer model.
  - Late 2012 Macs appear to only get drivers for 64 bit Windows, in spite of the Apple website not saying that. In this case, you'll have to re-install a 64-bit Windows version.
  - Try the Everymac page for a summary of which computers run 32/64 bit windows
3. Back to item one – your download didn't work properly. Get a download manager and try it again
If you no longer have OS X on your machine, or if you did the download in Windows anyway, then opening-a-bootcamp-driver-download-on-windows-7-or-8-with-7-zip is the page that explains how to open the pkg file and the dmg file in Windows
And finally the really obscure one: All you get in your download is drivers for a Motoral modem. I'm not sure what's going on here, so I'm grasping at straws but you could try this: in the download URL, replace the http://swcdn.apple.com/ by using nslookup to to see if you can change which server is 'really' serving your download, for instance:

http://apple.vo.llnwd.net/

http://swcdn.apple.com.akadns.net/

http://95.140.227.134/

MacBook Pro doesn’t go to sleep properly / Spotlight takes ages at start up – NTFS

I've had this problem on and off for years, with 2 MacBooks, that they took as much as a minute to fall asleep or failed to do so at all. At the moment my current theory is that Tuxera NTFS / NTFS-3G have been the culprits: it would sometimes use 30% CPU to do nothing and killing it let the machine sleep. And I think it's responsible for the problem I have that SpotLight doesn't work properly for several minutes after first starting up the machine and logging in - it seems to be indexing the BootCamp partition.
I've recently install the current version, 2012.3.4 and it was fine for a while – sleep and spotlight problem resolved. But they still came back and at the moment I'm working with NTFS not mounting the BootCamp partition.

Which is fine until I want to copy something onto it for use in Windows... Grrr. So at the moment my workaround is to use the Tuxera System Preferences Pane to manually switch it on and off when needed.

There are other solutions for NTFS support in OS X, but the Apple unreleased one isn't recommended which leaves you with the paid ones, Tuxera or Paragon, or the free Tuxera one, NTFS-3G.

Installing BootCamp on Macs with large hard drives

There's a great post on this subject at http://dice.neko-san.net/2012/12/how-to-install-boot-camp-on-a-3tb-fusion-drive-mac/. It's not for the faint-hearted though, more for the command line geek with a fair grasp of disk partitioning.

Boot Camp drivers for Windows 8 for Mac

It turns out that Windows 8 is largely the same as Windows 7 as far as drivers go, so most Mac/Boot Camp users on Windows 7 waiting for Apple to release Windows 8 drivers can just go ahead and install Windows 8 on an existing Windows 7 partition.

If you are upgrading from anything earlier - Vista or XP - then you will have to download the latest BootCamp drivers - aka Windows Support Software - from Apple. The easy way to do this is to run Boot Camp Assistant from within OS X, and tick the box for 'Download the latest Windows support software from Apple'.

If Boot Camp Assistant fails to download the drivers for you, then you can still get the by following instructions on /p682/download-bootcamp-drivers.

If you've removed OS X from your Mac and have to do the download in Windows, then you'll also need this page /p860/opening-a-bootcamp-driver-download-on-windows-7-or-8-with-7-zip

A couple of people have reported that the drivers don't work 100%. I'm not sure which models work completely, all I can tell you is that for my Core2 Duo MacBookPro everything works fine, including the camera, backlit keyboard, and screen resolution.