Windows 10 on MacBook Pro Mid 2010 13"

After 2 years of running Windows 10 x64 on my mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro 2.4, these are my notes.

I used it extensively for my engineering work, dual-booting with MacOS (which is still supported on this aging computer). High Sierra will likely be the last update for it, and probably the last MacOS I will own because the latest Apple notebooks are not attractive to me at all as this one was.

-Updates are extremely intrusive. In my case, Windows insisted on overwriting the current Nvidia driver with a broken one. It is possible to block this update with an obscure Microsoft utility, but every so often Microsoft will give the new driver a new update ID, so the entire blocking process has to be gone through again. I got around this issue by enabling a group policy to check before updating. However, this policy only worked about 50% of the time.

-The "big" updates are essentially OS upgrades. In my case, it re-enabled all the devices I had disabled in device manager, causing resource conflicts and about a day of downtime. Also, there was a bizarre change for 1607 that reset brightness to 50% at login on the Education editions of Windows 10. You can read about it online.

Unresolved issues on this computer. I could not solve these issues:

-DPC-related stuttering and BSODs. I chased this problem for more than 2 years even back on Windows 8. The problem would manifest itself by random stuttering audio during disk access and occasional BSODs. BSODs were eliminated if OverrideMaxPerf is set like in my tutorial. I never could track it down.

-Strange sound volume issues. Sometimes when switching between speakers and headphones the volume ceiling would change. Temporarily resolved by restarting the Windows Audio Service.

Because of this issues, I have downgraded back to Windows 7. The DPC issues are NOT reproducible. If I have time, I will track down what driver or Windows feature is causing this problem.

The volume issues are also in 7. Again, the latest Nvidia drivers that aren't broken are the 327.23 2013 drivers.

It's interesting, this MacBook has been supported for a very long time by Apple (7 years and counting). I can't see this happening with newer Apple notebooks because of their inability to be upgraded, but who knows. Their inability to be upgraded (and all the other silly issues like dongles) have pushed me away from Apple, unfortunately.

I've heard that one of the introduced features in Windows 8 was dynamic CPU ticks, and this was causing crashes on certain MacBooks. This might be part of the DPC issues I experienced.

More updates:

I was incorrect, Windows 7 x64 is just as broken as Windows 10 on the 2010 13" MacBook Pro with Apple's drivers. On a clean installation of Boot Camp 4 without modifications, these are the issues affecting Windows 7-10 on the mid-2010 MacBook Pro 2.4:

1. Corrupt graphics with the 2011 Nvidia driver.

2. Sound volume ceiling issue.

3. Applications that rely on keyboard language to set shortcuts fail to work (such as Word 2013). This results in no Ctrl-Command (such as Ctrl-C) in these applications.

4. High DPC latency.

5. Judder with the current Firefox video decoder.

6. Complete DPC-related death. No BSOD, just crackled audio to complete freeze. Nothing in event viewer either.

Resolution:

1. Install 327.23 drivers. Resolved.

2. Unresolved. Workaround is running the Audio Restart bat to restart the audio subsystem.

3. Set keyboard region to US from United States (Apple) in text services and input language. Resolved.

4. Unresolved.

5. See 6. Resolved.

6. This was the trickiest one. It seems to be related to various misbehaving drivers. Chief among these was Nvidia's driver failing to switch power states as mentioned in my earlier tutorial. However, it seems to be related to other drivers as well because the freezes still occur with Nvidia's power switching disabled (but less frequently). What probably happens is one driver asks for something less efficiently than ideal, and another driver gets in the way until Windows times out and freezes.

The current workaround is this:

a. Disable the following devices: Apple Bluetooth; IEEE 1394; Apple IR; SD Card Reader; Broadcom Ethernet.

b. Run nForcer for Performance 3D (the registry change automated, along with a few other changes).

c. Advanced tab of Broadcom wireless: disable 802.11a; disable minimum power consumption.

d. Rename applehfs.sys, applemnt.sys, and machaldriver.sys to *.sys.old.

7. Restart.

Obviously, some things will not work. I haven't tested Apple's online updates yet. So far, the system is improved and stable. These fixes also apply to Windows 8 and 10. These freezes don't occur right away, sometimes they take many days of uptime to manifest themselves. I use this computer for applications that require long uptime, so stability is essential for me. I don't know if anyone still uses this MacBook, but if they are here are my results.

Link for fixes zip: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AnoqsEUuNJd4gP5nkYBJC2VI73coWg.

I will update my tutorial to reflect these findings one of these days.

It wont, I upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 Ultimate on my 2010 Macbook Pro and it glitched out and I had to hard reset it. Every time the graphics card was needed, it froze. And then I had to reformat the Bootcamp partition and reinstall Windows 7.

My Windows 7 is running flawlessly. Its actually performing better than the Mac OS partition. I have Steam installed on both my Mac and Windows 7, and games run noticeably smoother on the Windows side.

Just wanted to say thank you for all of the documentation you've provided. I'm about to resurrect one of these old guys and plan to eventually get 10 running; your guide will save me a lot of time! Any chance you can re-host the fixes zip? The link appears to be broken.

It runs perfectly on my Mac Pro 2010. The only thing not working is the front audio connector for some reason.

Not supporting windows 10 is simply another attempt from apple to argue buying a new one.

But why should we do that when our old ones are faster than the latest and most expansive trashcan models?!

They are also undermining the driver support with every OSX version for my 1080ti which blows all other apple options away.

These are really lame tactics from apple and already forced me to leave the apple universe...

Your hardware will not support W10. Please see Use Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp - Apple Support and the section Mac computers that support Windows 10 .

I have a macbook pro 15" 2010 and windows 10 works fine. You just need to "repair" the bootcamp drivers tool for your macbook, meaning you just run the installation again

Hi, I am replying to you from a mid 2010 mac book pro 13, using Windows 10 in Boot Camp.

I upgraded from windows 7 Ultimate.. My boot camp version is 4.0. The only two issues I am experiencing are. 1) The keyboard light cannot be controlled and 2) The screen brightness cannot be adjusted from the keyboard, everything else works great; Microsoft has outdone themselves with this OS.

If you are willing to try, I suggest you check your boot camp version and update to 4.0 if needed...

Overall win 10 in boot camp works great!

Hope this helps

p.s If you upgrade to Win 10 DO NOT attempt to update Boot Camp (you can adjust keyboard for secondary click or adjust screen brightness in Boot Camp), I did, and I had to delete Boot Camp entirely, re-install win 7 and then re-install win 10

because when I messed with it after installing windows 10 I had no light on the keyboard.. now I do.. just can't adjust.

Since I have used these forums many times and found them very helpful, I hope I can help someone in turn.

x64 (and probably x86) Windows 10 runs fine on the 2010 13" MacBook Pro (well, as well as it can with a Core 2 Duo and 6GB of RAM). However, it is a little involved.

What you need prepared (on a flash drive perhaps):

1) Boot Camp 5.1.5769

2) NVidia 327.23 Drivers

3) Three files from the Apple support package for Windows 7 (you can download the package through boot camp assistant, or from somewhere on Apple's web site): AppleKeyboardInstaller64.exe, AppleMultiTouchTrackPadInstaller64.exe, and the NVidia directory (with NVidiaChipset and Win7 folders inside).

4) If you want the LCD to display colors correctly, take the color profile from OS X.

The Steps:

1) Install Windows 10. You can trick boot camp assistant with a Windows 7 disc if you like to get the support package, or you can just do the partitioning yourself.

2) Do NOT connect to the internet, because Windows Update will force install a driver for the 320M that is broken (thanks, Microsoft).

3) Find bootcamp.msi, and run msiexec /i bootcamp.msi in an elevated cmd. Also run the trackpad and keyboard installer.

4) Watch Apple's drivers get installed.

5) Go to device manager, find the 2 problem devices, point the 'update driver' mechanism to the NVidia directory and watch your drivers get installed.

6) Install the NVidia 327.23 drivers and fix the color profile if you like.

7) This is the critical step: download the update blocker utility from Microsoft here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3073930. Connect to the internet and (quickly) run the utility and block the NVidia drivers from installing. Once they get onto your system, they will reinstall themselves over any other driver, which is what happened to me. If this happens to you, run DDU (display driver uninstaller) to get rid of the 2015 driver once and for all, reinstall the right driver, and block the update again. These drivers DO NOT WORK and will result in corrupt graphics, even in XP/7/whatever. You can tell if you have them by looking in device manager and looking at the driver date for the 320M. The right drivers are from 2013, and the bad drivers are from 2015.

8) We're not done yet. Apple's HFS drivers break some Windows 10 features (at the time of this writing) so go to windows/system32/drivers and rename AppleHFS.sys and AppleMNT.sys to something else (AppleHFS_disabled.sys for example). You can access the HFS partition with some other utility, such as Paragon's free HFS extension, but I haven't tried it. For example, I couldn't access storage and apps & features in the settings panel with them enabled, it would crash.

9) Your text will be blurry in some applications because Windows tries to auto scale them because who knows. Set custom scaling to 100% in settings.

10) Disable ethernet because it causes huge DPC spikes. Re-enable when you're using it. Also disable the IR and bluetooth radios because they're useless. Also turn off auto brightness because it's equally pointless.

11) Reboot and you're done. I also disabled Microsoft's data collection through the registry: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\DataCollection\AllowTel emetry and change to 0, disabled start menu web search with a group policy and settings setting, and disabled the Windows Update service because I am not OK with MS installing whatever they like on my computer given their track record. I also did a few other tweaks like disabling cortana and removing live tiles from the start menu, but that's up to you. I also disabled automatic driver updating (which didn't do anything because WU does what it likes), removed the "Windows 10 Education Edition" watermark with the Universal Watermark Disabler, and disabled "occasionally show suggestions in start menu," all of which are speed tweaks which help running 10 on a C2D.

12) If you happen to use Norton, and have exhausted your licenses due to reinstalling Windows, the client has a bug that will hang on activation in 10. Pick a preferred web browser in settings, run activation and you'll be good.

13) Change the background from a boring Windows window.

Everything works, including trackpad, backlight, iSight, whatever. Windows 10 runs as well as it would on any other 5 year old computer. I can't afford a new computer and I need Windows for some school work. 10 is free and the start screen is the dumbest idea since the 9x core.

Very helpful post. Thanks for posting your findings. ➕

Of course, I hope they help someone.

I forgot to mention that to install Windows updates, simply re-enable Windows Update (every week or so) by going to services and changing startup from disabled to manual, start it, and have it update itself. Then turn it off again. You can also block updates with the blocker utility if you like. Just don't run Windows without updating for years, it's not OS X.

Arg, I forgot that even the good drivers have a critical bug in them that 1) produces very high DPC lag rendering Windows unusable for real-time audio with the 320M (in ANY version of Windows) and 2) frequent BSODs from switching performance states. Both of these problems stem from the chip's power saving features, because forcing the card under a load (playing a DVD movie or game for example) drops the DPC numbers back to low (admirably low) numbers. Left unchecked, these sloppy DPCs can and will cause frequent DPC Watchdog BSODs (confirmed by me across 7, 8.1, and now 10).

The 2nd of these problems can be cured by going into the registry HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\The folder with a 0000 and a 0001 with a bunch of keys in each. Insert a binary value with the name 'OverrideMaxPerf' in 0000 or 0001, and set it to 03 00 00 00. This locks the card in it's highest power state (or at least it's supposed to). 02 00 00 00 locks it in low power 3D, 01 ... 2D etc. This stops the BSODs (but not the stuttering audio due to the driver's latency).

If you want to do audio work, the only workaround is to temporarily disable the NVidia driver.

Thank you for the detailed post! Can you please specify which version of bootcamp.msi to use? I've tried the one that comes with BootCamp 5.1.5769 and it results in an error about the installation package not being supported by this processor type. I've also tried the one that comes with the Win 7 Drivers I found (BootCamp4.0.4033) and it causes an error saying I need to be running Windows 7.

Thanks!

How did you run bootcamp.msi? You have to run it from an administrator command prompt as in step 3. Right click on the command prompt shortcut and choose 'run as administrator.' Then navigate to the bootcamp.msi directory and type msiexec /i bootcamp.msi.