Jan Becket
Level 1 (14 points)
Desktops

Q: to upgrade Boot Camp drivers - or not?

Iʻm running BC on a Mac Pro early 2008, Yosemite and Windows 10. I got ready to update the BC drivers because my Bluetooth Apple mouse was losing contact frequently.  Now I am not so sure this is a good idea.

 

Iʻve already taken these steps prior to the upgrade. The Boot Camp Apple app utility would not recognize my internal Boot Camp disk in one of my machineʻs extra bays and so I purchased an external USB disk as instructed, formatted it DOS FAT32, downloaded the folder called Windows Support which contains updated drivers, and then copied the folder to my internal Boot Camp drive in the extra bay. As far as I can tell, the upgrade is ready to go.

 

Now I am hesitating to run the BC .exe utility I downloaded because of the issues I have read about here, with BC ceasing to function after driver upgrades. My question: is an upgrade a good idea at this point or should I put up with the mouse issue for a while?

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Aug 24, 2015 12:34 PM

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Jan Becket

Q: to upgrade Boot Camp drivers - or not?

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  • by BobTheFisherman,

    BobTheFisherman BobTheFisherman Aug 24, 2015 12:46 PM in response to Jan Becket
    Level 6 (15,707 points)
    Aug 24, 2015 12:46 PM in response to Jan Becket

    Your computer is not supported.

    Use Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp - Apple Support

  • by Jan Becket,

    Jan Becket Jan Becket Aug 24, 2015 1:15 PM in response to BobTheFisherman
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Desktops
    Aug 24, 2015 1:15 PM in response to BobTheFisherman

    I appear to have circumvented Boot Camp compatibility issues by allowing Windows to upgrade itself to 10, rather than attempting to use the Boot Camp utility. The compatibility issues may be less serious in my case because I am running Boot Camp on an internal SATA drive formatted NTFS in an extra bay, not on a disk partition of my primary Mac drive.

     

    Compatibility aside, Windows 10 is running well on my vintage Mac w/ Yosemite 10.10.5 - aside from the mouse thing. I still need to answer the upgrade question regarding those drivers. Reading between the lines of your answer, you seem to be saying do not upgrade. Is that correct?

     

    Next year I plan to upgrade my vintage Mac Pro to a current tower, and plan to boot Windows 10 on exactly the same SATA NTFS disk plugged into the new Mac. Should I wait until then to upgrade Boot Camp drivers?

  • by GhonaZ,Helpful

    GhonaZ GhonaZ Aug 24, 2015 2:11 PM in response to Jan Becket
    Level 2 (433 points)
    Windows Software
    Aug 24, 2015 2:11 PM in response to Jan Becket

    I don't know which machine you exactly have. But apple has listed which machines have windows 10 support and can use the drivers correctly Use Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp - Apple Support.

    If yours isn't listed the hardware drivers for your machine may not be available. You can always try to manually update the specific bluetooth driver that might be causing trouble. Or test another bluetooth mouse to see if that has the same issue with your machine.

    The disk on which your windows OS is installed does not really matter. The drivers interact with the other hardware in the machine, not only the harddrive. However your bootcamp automatically detects which mac you have and downloads the drivers accordingly. If, after installing your machine ends up worse you can manually remove all the new drivers and install the older drivers. But I think that since Bootcamp automatically choses the drivers for you that that won't be necessary.

  • by Jan Becket,

    Jan Becket Jan Becket Aug 24, 2015 2:33 PM in response to GhonaZ
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Desktops
    Aug 24, 2015 2:33 PM in response to GhonaZ

    Thanks for the info. My knowledge of BC inner workings is obviously a bit sketchy. I think Iʻll try that manual driver update from within Windows and let laying dogs alone by avoiding that Boot Camp .exe file.