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Letters to the World

06-Nov-2009

Fun with 64-bit Windows and Boot Camp

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 4:20 pm

So, on a whim, I decided to try installing a 64-bit version of Windows 7 onto my MacBook. And as soon as I tried to load the Boot Camp drivers, I immediately got an error message claiming that “Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer model.”

Turns out that 64-bit Windows is only supported on the latest generation of Macs. Which my year-old white MacBook, quite obviously, isn’t.

But as I discovered, it also turns out there’s a way to manually install the drivers, which I present here for anyone else curious to try 64-bit Windows on an older MacBook:

  1. Make sure your Snow Leopard DVD is inserted. (You did get Snow Leopard, right?)
  2. Go to the Start menu and type cmd — then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter.
  3. Answer “yes” to the UAC prompt.
  4. Type "d:\Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple\BootCamp64.msi" (with quotes).
  5. Go through the installer!

The only driver that seemed to produce any sort of error at all after doing this on my MacBook was the Bluetooth driver, and that still appears to work; I got my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard working under Windows.

Just putting this out there for anyone else who wanted to see whether they could get 64-bit Windows running.

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