Rodney Campbell's Blog

I recently installed Windows Vista under Parallels (I’m running the latest Beta – Build 3150) which worked fine except as Parallels does not yet support 3D graphics acceleration you don’t get any of those nice Aero Glass effects.

To see how well Vista can run on a Mac I decided to give Apple’s Bootcamp beta (version 1.1.2) a try.

Installation of Bootcamp is painless and after making a 20GB partition for windows and creating the Macintosh Bootcamp Drivers for Windows XP CD I was ready to boot the Vista installation DVD.

After going through the normal process of installing Windows Vista (it autodetects and installs drivers for just about all of the MacBook Pro’s hardware – including as it happens my Apple Bluetooth keyboard and Bluetooth Wireless Mighty mouse) I manually installed a few more things to get Vista working just right.

First off ethernet and graphics drivers work out of the box (including Aero) however I updated the ATI catalyst drivers (including support for the Mobility Radeon X1600) to the latest Vista release from Catalyst 7.1 Display Driver for Windows Vista (32 bit).

To enable iSight and Sound you will need to manually extract and install the drivers from the Macintosh Bootcamp Drivers for Windows XP CD you made before – to do this insert the CD into the drive and run the following from a DOS command prompt under Windows Vista:

D:\Install Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP.exe /A /v

and follow the prompts to extract the drivers to a location.

To install the Sound driver navigate to the location where you extracted the drivers and go to the "program files\Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP 1.1.2\SigmaTel" folder and double click the setup.exe file in there.

To install the iSight driver Launch the Control Panel and go into the Device Manager. Go to sub-category called "Imaging Devices". iSight should be listed there. Right click the item and select "Update Driver Software". Manually install the driver by choosing "Browse My Computer For Driver Software", tick "Let Me Pick From a List…" and tick "Have Disk". Now navigate to your drivers folder and select the iSight.inf file in the "program files\Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP 1.1.2\iSight" folder. Install the driver.

Instead of installing the BootCamp Apple Keyboard driver and Brightness Controller program I suggest you just install the excellent Input Remapper software. This little gem basically gives you all the Apple Function key functionality available in OS X (F1 and F2 Screen Brightness, F3 Mute, F3 and F4 Volume Down and Up, F6 Num Lock, F8 F9 and F10 Keyboard Backlighting controls, F11 and F12 Media Playback controls and Eject plus things like Ctrl-Alt-Del.

BTW: My Vista Ratings (for my 17" MacBook Pro – 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, 160GB 5400RPM HD) were:

Processor: 5.2
Memory (RAM): 4.7
Graphics: 4.9
Gaming Graphics: 4.9
Hard Disk: 4.8

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