[NPMUG] Snow Leopard & Boot Camp

[Chris Hardin]

Another Snow Leopard story that might be of interest -

I got my wife a 13" aluminum macbook last year - she really likes it.  
I had been running boot camp on an older iMac in the house, but she  
wanted to be able to run certain Windows apps for some school work  
she was doing, so I moved everything to the macbook.

That part didn't go well - boot camp had run great on the iMac, but  
ran poorly on the macbook. A lot of that may have been my own fault.  
I inadvertently used the boot camp drivers from my original Leopard  
install disk (for the iMac) instead of the one that came with the  
laptop. As a result, many of the laptop specific features just  
wouldn't work right under boot camp. When I realized the error, I  
tried to update the drivers with the ones from the macbook's install  
disk, but things were still never quite right.

So I got my Snow Leopard family pack upgrade a week ago, and went  
through and updated the Mac side of the laptop. Everything went fine  
- I didn't see the exact starting number, but it saved me over 10GB  
of space on the hard drive. Then I went to try to update the boot  
camp drivers again - and got this error message that Windows was  
unable to uninstall the old drivers because the source files did not  
match. Huh??

A couple days later I ran some google searches, and found similar  
comments from other people. The solution: Go back to the original  
disk used to install boot camp and "uninstall" the drivers from  
there. Then install the new drivers from the new snow leopard disk.  
So I pulled out the old disk, and was pleasantly surprised to find  
that uninstalling the old drivers was an option. So I did that, then  
installed the new boot camp drivers from the SL disk - and suddenly  
everything works great!

For the first time, I now have wireless access on the Windows side, I  
can now see the "Macintosh HD" and read files from it, and the  
trackpad finally works right - things like tap-to-click and two- 
finger scrolling. The sound is working better, and although I haven't  
been able to try it yet, I think the iSight camera will finally work.

So if you're running boot camp on your mac and run into weird Windows  
error messages - try uninstalling from the original Leopard disk and  
things may work out.

Regards,
Chris Hardin