apple wireless keyboard win 10/x64

Hi Loner,

thanks for your suggestion. I have tried that before and now once more precisely as you suggested - it did not work. But hopefully I can now provide you with more details which, imho, clearly point to a driver error.

The following picture suggests a way to connect the apple wireless keyboard (awk) to a stubborn machine:

I followed this procedure (did NOT see the apple keyboard with the warning sign at this point, btw) and deleted all those drivers and tried to reinstall them from bootcamp 5640 hoping that the older (win7?) version would work better. This apparently installed some drivers but not all and so I decided to go for the official Apple release bootcamp 6.0.6136. After installing this and rebooting I got the following information from the device manager:

Now this is all in German (since I am German! :-) ) but it still should be understandable. I have marked the points of interest. Much to my surprise, with a "fresh" bootcamp driver installation the awk DOES show up both under bluetooth AND under HID, albeit in the latter case with a yellow error mark.

Following the usual routines for reinstalling the driver etc. does NOT work in this case.

So I decided to further enlighten the problem a bit. The next picture shows that the respective (yellow marked) driver cannot be started:

(again I have inserted a translation of the relevant text).

Here are the comments with respect to the error message:

Here are the driver details:

Upon comparison of these drivers with the drivers which become installed upon coupling the awk to a "standard" win7/x64 PC I note that ALL the drivers show up there too, however, the file sizes are slightly different as compared to the win 10/x64 counterparts. So there have been "adjustments" by MS. Since these all are generic MS drivers as it seems to me at least, the faulty one should be the Apple KeyMagic.sys!

Anyway, upon trying to reconnect the freshly unpaired awk, this is what happens: At first, the MBA says "there is an awk waiting to be coupled":

upon clicking on "couple" NO CODE is generated but rather this window shows up:

Since there is no code generated to be keyed in on the awk, I tried "0000" and "000000" by keying these in on the MBA's own keyboard. Otherwise there would be no contuation possible at this point. Not unexpectedly, this gets me the following:

And from now on, I am in a loop of "ready for coupling - couple - no code - failure. The two entries marked in red in the second screen shot above, have disappeared by now, btw.

To sum up: isn't it pretty curious that an awk can be connected even to a standard windows PC but not to a MBA running under win 10!?

Out of curiosity and since it's not THAT much work, I deleted my bootcamp win10 partition and set up a fresh one with freshly downloaded win 10/x64. After installing the OS I kept bootcamp from installing all those drivers only to find out that much of the system worked quite ok: the cinema display worked nicely, SO DID BOTH THE MAGIC MOUSE AND THE WIRELESS KEYBOARD (!!!!!). But they did not, naturally, work with all features like scrolling, special keys etc., just the basic functions.

In any case this clearly shows that the devices in a most basic form were recognized by win10 automatically and by aid of the on-board drivers.

I tried then to install the bootcamp/win7 drivers (5640) but that both did not run to completion (although the keyboard drivers apparently were installed) neither would it change the situation with the wireless keyboard (i.e. basic functions preserved, nothing else).

Upon installing the appropriate bootcamp drivers (6136) the situation arose as documented in the following four screenshots - again I've translated the relevant information. The keyboard is not connected/connectable since the driver is not working. Unfortunately, this results in the wireless keyboard becoming disconnected, i.e. you can't use it any longer, not even with its basic functions.

So there is no doubt that the Apple wireless keyboard driver as programmed for win10 is corrupted.

Help, Apple!

One really never should say never (or final!) :-)

win 10/wireless keyboard issue SOLVED - well, to (quite) some extent, at least.

In view of the above observations I thought of getting rid of that single faulty Apple wireless keyboard driver und just revert to the default windows driver (which was shown to work before invoking bootcamp, cf. posts above). Deleting the device from the device manager and reinstalling it by trying an old (bootcamp 5) driver did not work, win10 automatically reverts to its original state. Preventing some drivers from becoming updated by fiddling around with the group rights also did not seem attractive, at least not to me.

So I just opened the "programs" directory from the system manager and deleted/uninstalled one of the two Apple keyboard drivers which showed up there. I forgot the number, but the other one of the two even was not deletable. The current state of affairs (with my mid 2013 MacBook Air, 10.11.5) is shown in this screenshot (despite the German language its meanings still should be intelligible):

So there is now just ONE Windows driver package - Apple Inc. Apple Keyboard ...6200.

The device manager now looks like this:

Under bluetooth, the Apple wireless keyboard shows up allright, under Human Interface Devices the keyboard does NOT show up any longer, but under keyboards (German: "Tastaturen") two devices show up, the first one is the BT (wireless) keyboard, and the second one is the on board keyboard (likely USB connected).

Upon invoking the win 10 BT manager the keyboard now is recognized and can be paired smoothly (with keycode input).

Naturally, the Apple "special" keys like dimming the screen and changing speaker volume do NOT work with this default driver, but that is not that important for me. I was delighted to see that the external wireless keyboard even can be used to select the boot partition upon booting and under win 10 immediately is recognized for logging in. Quite satisfying, so far.

By using (the windows program) "key tweak" it even might be possible to get all those other keys to work, but I have not looked into that so far.

Still, I would like to urge Apple to do something about their wireless keyboard driver for win10/x64. .

Close to zero, to be honest. This IS a clean installation! Admittedly I played around with them drivers but sfc /scannow did not bring up any irregularities. In addition, RIGHT AFTER the final bootcamp run, i.e. right before the system was used for the very first time I got the message concerning a "driver error". This related, imho, to the very problem I've detailed above.

Browsing the web brings up numerous examples of the same problem - there must be a problem with one of the Apple drivers. Mind you: the keyboard CAN be paired with a standard windows7- PC.

I deleted the respective drivers via pnputil as you suggested (had to enforce deletion in cases since they were in use). Rerun of bootcamp, reboot - by and large same situation as before:

-- apple wireless keyboard marked as non functional
-- msi installation failure during bootcamp inst, but runs otherwise (apparently!) ok
-- wireless kb reported under BT as "incomplete inst. " > remove

-- readd > no pairing key generated

I had unpaired the keyboard before from MacOS.

I continue to suspect one of the drivers not to programmed correcly or perhaps there is an error in the inst routine.

mind you: the wireless keyboard DID WORK under win7/x64 on my MBA. It lost "reliability" recently and required fairly often re-pairing (which could be time consuming) but in the end it would work under 7/64. But not under 10/64 (which was set up de nouveau, not upgraded, btw (upgrade was "snaggy").

5640 did not install at all as evident from the failure to play sound, connect to the net etc. 6136 is causing the problem, that's for sure. The system even gets me more detailed descriptiuons of the driver problem, but these are all in German and hard to translate.

Apple may want to look into this issue directly - I recall mention of an incorrect parameter to be set somewhere, integer instead of whatever or such.

Although both the SMC and the NVRAM really shouldn't interfere with hardware to be hooked up to bootcamp/win10 I reset those and not unexpectedly - absolutely no change with respect to the wireless keyboard connection problem!

Windows continues to alert to an "unknown device" drivers for can't be found by internet search and a warning concerning the keyboard where a driver update gets me "actual driver installed" but no change with respect to the status of the keyboard (this information shown yb the device manager).

So this is my FINAL message regarding the keyboard driver issue.

I got yet another MacBook Air (also from Mid 2013) to install win 10/x64 on.

This was - imho - the perfect "Clean" install:

-- update the MBA (10.11.5 via the appstore)

-- reset both smc and nvram on that machine (just be on the safe side, still I cannot imagine any relation between windows drivers and smc/nvram!)

-- get a fresh win10prof64 iso file from Microsoft

-- have a new SanDisk usb stick at hand

-- start bootcamp, copy the iso file onto the stick via bootcamp (which erases the stick, reformats it and makes it bootable) and get the bootcamp drivers from the net automatically

-- install and basic configure win10, let bootcamp run

-- update win10

-- run the Apple update program (which installs bootcamp wlan plus - presumably - the new "magic" keyboard

-- check the system, everything running fine

-- hook up the Apple magic mouse via the win10 bluetooth routine - smooth installation, mouse runs fine

-- hook up the Apple wireless keyboard
-- -- the keyboard is recognized, upon pairing the driver installation begins and immediately crashes the system which automatically reboots

-- -- after reboot and retrying the pairing the process is stpped with the message "driver error".

So there is nothing wrong here but a faulty driver!

Corrections would be very much appreciated...

Even if that works for a MacBook Pro: I am using a MacBook Air and things certainly do not work out properly as I have proven here sufficiently, imho. Perhaps there are certain differences in hardware details, despite the fact that the bootcamp drivers (apparently) did not differ for MBP and MBA.

Another issue might be (although I can hardly imagine this actually to be possible) that the MBA's I am working with are "descendants" of my very first Apple, which was the first Intel based MBP, followed by the early MBA model followed by the current mid 2013 MBA. Throughout these hardware generations the OS never was set up cleanly, but only upgraded from 10.6 to 10.7 and so on up to the current 10.11.5.

I do not know whether this might affect, with time, hardware driver configurations or such - hopefully not. This very option (i.e. the possibility to transfer ALL your data PLUS programs) via a time machine backup to a new machine is perhaps the most valuable feature of MacOS as compared to say, Windows. And although the number of programs which only are available for Windows constantly has decreased through the last years, there remain a few which can't be run with wineskin/winery and this continues to call for double boot with Windows (talking NOT about games here, to be sure).

Compatible drivers then shouldn't be a problem for Apple, especially, if they offer bootcamp as such. And the current (6136) wireless keyboard driver is NOT compatible - at least not with MBA (mid 2013, 13``/i7/8GB RAM/512SSD).

Unfortunately no, I could use a 2012 MBP (i5/8GB RAM/512 SSD). To be honest, though: what would this tell us? The Pro is a different Machine as compared to the Air, and drivers are right between hardware and OS. So, even if things do work nicely with a MacBookPro, they certainly do not so on a MacBook Air...