BootCamp 5 on a 2008 1st gen Unibody MBPro

This is an experience and frustration sharing. Using BootCamp 4 on 10.8.2 I was able to upgrade my Windows 7 installation to Windows 8 64bit. I had a perfectly good working installation with absolutely no problems using the drivers from the this version of BootCamp and updating some of the third party drivers through their respective manufacturers eg. nvidia. The only issue I experienced was that there was no on-screen feedback on keyboard input for brightness, keyboard illumination, sound volume and CD eject. So much for incompatibility of Win 8 with BootCamp 4!

For irrelevant reasons I erased the BootCamp partition off my SSD prior to updating to 10.8.3. Today I tried to recreate my Windows partition using BootCamp Assistant but I got bumped! When asked for inserting a Windows installation CD, I put the Windows 8 installation media but it stopped right there with the message saying that my computer is not compatible with Windows 8! And as it often happens in cases like that, I did not have a Win 7 CD at hand!

I was saved by the use of two very valuable pieces of software; Tuxera NTFS and Winclone. Using the former I had created an image of my previous Windows installation which I restored on a newly created partition using Disk Utility and formatting it as NTFS using the driver of the latter. Once booted into Windows I used the instructions on this thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4892998?answerId=21533035022#21533035022 to install the BootCamp 5 drivers. Everything perfect, even the on-screen feedback issue.

I was an IT proffessional, an Apple Certified Technical Coordinator on 10.2 and I've been a mac user since 1990! I'm tired of frustration upon frustration deriving from Apple's reluctance to support perfectly capable machinery just to coerce its loyalist into buying new one. By God, I'm perfectly content in my late 2008 UNIBODY (Core 2 Duo 2,66MHz/6MB cache, 256GB SSD, 4GB RAM, 9600M GT 512MB) for using Safari, Mail, MSOffice and Omnifocus 99% of the time! And I want the latest in OS as manufacturers spec permit. Windows Experience Index on this machine is 5.9! And it certainly feels faster on Win 8 than it does on 10.8.3! (maybe that is the reason that is unsupported?...).

This is my 9th Mac notebook and (if I remember well) my 12th mac. There are currently 4 Macs in my house and family's use (Macbook Pro, Mac mini and iMac), 3 iPhones, an iPad and 5 different iPods of different types. I am a loyalist but I've had enough of Apple trying to coerce older customers in buying products they do not NEED and not paying attention to the real world needs!