Windows 10 on MacBook Pro Mid 2010 13"

Hi. So currently I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on my Mid 2010 13 inch model. Everything appears to be running smoothly, however I've been looking to upgrade. On the boot camp compatibility list, it says my device can only run up to Windows 7 64 bit. Would my device still work if I made the upgrade?


Thanks,

-Brad

MacBook Pro, Other OS, MacBook Pro 13" mid 2010

Posted on Aug 13, 2015 7:35 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 13, 2017 11:36 AM

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.

66 replies

Jul 11, 2016 10:11 AM in response to Apples555

Hola ! Llegue al paso 6. Instalo los drivers (341.95-desktop-win10-64bit-international) reconoce mi hardware, arranca pasan unos segundos, mi pantalla se pone en negro y la pc se reinicia! No se instalan nunca los drivers Nvidia. Que hago mal? Alguna solución?

Nvidia 327.23 no me reconoce hardware por eso utilizo el 341.95

Tambiénutilice Bootcamp drivers (WindowsSupport) instalados correctamente, funciona todo menos display y control de brillo tampoco.

Jul 11, 2016 10:18 AM in response to Apples555

Hola ! Llegue al paso 6. Instalo los drivers (341.95-desktop-win10-64bit-international) reconoce mi hardware, arranca pasan unos segundos, mi pantalla se pone en negro y la pc se reinicia! No se instalan nunca los drivers Nvidia. Que hago mal? Alguna solución?

Nvidia 327.23 no me reconoce hardware por eso utilizo el 341.95

Tambiénutilice Bootcamp drivers (WindowsSupport) instalados correctamente, funciona todo menos display y control de brillo tampoco.

MacBookPro 2010 2.4 6GB Ram GForce 320M Windows 10 x64 pro

Apr 17, 2017 11:57 AM in response to bradj5

Windows must be installed in BIOS mode. EFI Windows will not run on this computer, because Apple's EFI implementation is slightly older than necessary.


Apple's BIOS won't let you boot from a non-Apple optical drive or USB drive that doesn't contain Mac OS because Apple. rEFIt will overcome this and let you boot anything.


Easier than making a VM IMO.

Apr 17, 2017 1:57 PM in response to Apples555

I agree it is easier than VM but i was able to boot from USB by making the disk non hybrid i guess ( mentioned in one of Loner T's post). However the problem with that is win10 crashes on installing NVIDIA drivers.


Haven't tried rEFIt but i'm assuming that it would give similar result.


Right now stuck on the process of directly installing the VM image as a raw disk on the partition. The above link provides instruction on an older version of VM Fusion. Mine is 8 and somehow i'm not able to use the raw disk description files since the file extension is different.

Apr 21, 2017 10:21 AM in response to sidbidus

So i gave this another try.


First, i used rEFIt option as it was already installed. As earlier, when i restarted with usb i got three new options. 2 of them had EFI word in it, the third was boot from HD(it didn't say BIOS). So i used the third option and i got the black screen blinking hyphen for 20 mins and nothing happened.


Then i decided to remove rEFIT and installed rEFInd and on restarting with usb, i got an option which mentioned - Boot Fallback boot loader from USBname. I choose this option, intalled Win10, and on installing NVIDIA Win10 crashed again.


After browing some forums, it seems i had to partition the USB as MBR and not GPT. So i partioned the USB as MBR from mac and created win10 usb using Rufus which mentioned BIOS boot option formating.


Now i am getting the error which is preventing me to install-"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT style.". On net, it say it is due to a mismatch between the way the HDD is formatted and the USB format style.


Should I reformat the HDD with MBR. Coz on GUID, with usb formatted in GUID gives me the black screen blinking hyphen problem.


Any help is highly appreciated.

Apr 21, 2017 11:06 AM in response to sidbidus

sidbidus wrote:


Now i am getting the error which is preventing me to install-"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT style.". On net, it say it is due to a mismatch between the way the HDD is formatted and the USB format style.


Should I reformat the HDD with MBR. Coz on GUID, with usb formatted in GUID gives me the black screen blinking hyphen problem.

You cannot and should not reformat the disk to an MBR, but you need to create a Hybrid MBR, using GPT Fdisk. This 'maps' the underlying GPT to a MBR and mimics a legacy MBR disk, which is required for the BIOS installation to work.

Apr 23, 2017 9:42 AM in response to Apples555

So finally i am able to install Windows 10 on my mid 2010 macbook pro 13" with the NVIDIA drivers working absolutely fine.


I couldn't find much info on converting protective boot to hybrid boot. Also, adding a FAT32 partition didn't change this coz i guess i had changed it earlier to protective. Further, since i was having problem merging partitions, i formatted the HDD, used timemachine backup to restore and partitioned again, it worked fine. I must add that creating more than 2 partitions, 3 actually- MacHD, Bootcamp and Recovery, would not let one install Windows.


Almost forgot, pressing alt key and then selecting rEFIt gave me the option to boot from USB. When rEFIt started without pressing the alt key, it did not have the option to boot from USB.


Many thanks to Apple555 and LonerT, your prompt responses are highly appreciated.

Apr 23, 2017 12:05 PM in response to bradj5

Audio is working fine. The drivers are from Cirrus and NVIDIA and not from Realtek. So no problems there.


I read somewhere that windows install through BIOS booting work work on only primary partition and one can have three primary partitions. I saw that when i made another partition, it did not show as primary when i ran the win installer on the screen where it says where to install windows. I guess in your case since you have 2 os x and 1 windows it works, i might be wrong.


I could not find how to disable IR. I don't see it in device manager and in control panel is does not show any device installed under IR. However my ir remote works fine.


Lastly, the colors seem a tad faded vis-a-vis osx. I did try color calibration but still the colors are not that vibrant especially when playing movies.

Apr 23, 2017 12:21 PM in response to sidbidus

Windows doesn't know how to handle the MacBook LCD so the colors look awful. You have to take the color profile from Mac OS and set it as the color profile for the LCD in Windows. It's one of the steps in my tutorial. Color calibration is something different. IIRC it's somewhere here: Library\ColorSync\Profiles\Displays. You're looking for an icc profile.


I just disabled IR because I never use it. It should be somewhere in device manager, especially if it works.


Happy computing.

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Windows 10 on MacBook Pro Mid 2010 13"

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