Tag: mac

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:

  1. 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
  2. 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.
    3. Back to item one – your download didn't work properly. Get a download manager and try it again
  3. 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
  4. 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/

Make OS X Spaces work properly

For years I have shunned Apple's OS X Spaces as useless. I was excited about them for a good 2 minutes, which is how long it took to find out that if I had 2 spaces open, and I opened a browser in the 2nd space, then it flipped back to the 1st space. Completely not the point of having Spaces.
Until today. I found this setting in Mission Control:
OS X Mission Control when switching to an application switch Space setting
So I un-ticked it. Perfect. Now I can have a space for work, a space for homework, with browser and mail and other windows open in each space, and it no longer flips between them except I want it to.

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.