Drivers (Apple and others) from Bootcamp CD?

P

panca

Junior Member
Hi,

I am running Parallels without Bootcamp, yet I made myself the bootcamp driver CD made available by Apple. My question: should we install these drivers in Parallels? I have read various references to these drivers in the past, but information on their use never seemed to be conclusive or authoritative (maybe a license issue?)

On my CD (1.4 beta) there are drivers from Apple, Atheros, ATI, SigmaTel, Intel, Marvell, Motorola, Realtek Broadcom, and Nvidia. I am not sure whether all/the relevant ones get installed automatically if the CD starts. Additionally, I get an error if I the generic installer autostarts, probably because this is not a proper bootcamp-install, so I have to run individual installers manually. So far I only tried the Apple-Installers. I have a MacBook Pro 15" second generation, the graphics card is from ATI (currently the hardware-manager shows a "Parallels video driver"). So my questions are:

1. Should I install the drivers in Windows?
2. Which ones should I install for my notebook within parallels?

Best
Panca
 
Last edited:
Just install windows on bootcamp partition, with apple drivers.

Install parallels and just use existing bootcamp partition (no drivers needed)

Greetings
 
panca said:
Hi,
I am running Parallels without Bootcamp, yet I made myself the bootcamp driver CD made available by Apple. My question: should we install these drivers in Parallels?
Click to expand...

Short answer - no.

Parallels uses either its own (from Parallels Tools) or Windows' built-in drivers for the "motherboard", graphics, sound, trackpad etc. and has its own system for re-mapping mac- to windows- keyboard keys.

Certainly don't try and install the whole lot - at best it will install lots of stuff you don't need, at worst it will crash. The only thing that might be worth experimenting with is the iSight driver (I normally use a Mac Pro which doesn't have iSight - so I can't say if that works) but that's not really essential.
 
to revisit this question, can the bootcamp driver for the trackpad/ touchpad/ mousepad on the macbook pro be used to take advantage of the sideways scrolling? That's be awesome.
 
Hello,

I suppose itsdapead is right and you don't need to install those boot camp drivers into windows, except some specific drivers for iSight, for example.
But generally, Parallels has its own drivers.
 
Alicia said:
Hello,

I suppose itsdapead is right and you don't need to install those boot camp drivers into windows, except some specific drivers for iSight, for example.
But generally, Parallels has its own drivers.
Click to expand...

That's the official position? Parallels 'supposes' another sugegstion is correct?

Here's the simple question.

Can I install the apple trackpad driver from bootcamp to enable two-finger-sideways scrolling on the macbook pro?
 
itsadeadpea is right. Parallels has it's own mouse drivers... Now if you don't mind not using your trackpad in OS X you could use BootCamp drivers.
 
Hello,

Edd, no, two-finger-sideways scrolling won't be available in the VM even with boot camp drivers installed.
 
Edd said:
That's the official position? Parallels 'supposes' another sugegstion is correct?
Click to expand...

Edd - I don't think that's quite what Alicia meant.

I don't know about Alicia specifically, but please bear in mind that a lot of Parallels' staff are based in Europe and elsewhere and may be speaking English as a second language - usually with a fluency that shames woefully monolingual English speakers such as myself. Any complaints about occasional malapropisms or dubious grammar should be submitted in perfectly constructed Russian :-)

The issue about drivers is pretty fundamental to any virtualization system which has to "share" hardware between a guest and host OS.
 
Hello,

itsdapead, thank you for your concern :)
However, "I suppose" (I suppose it is the part that touched Edd) referred to the fact that a user may actually need to take some drivers from the boot camp drivers disk, like iSight one. Which, as you can see, is not obligatory.

Anyway, as was said before, boot camp drivers won't enable a specific scrolling feature of Mac's touchpad.
 
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