- I have an early 2011 MacBook Pro and the display looks great under OS X, but is really washed out in Windows 7. I have installed all the drivers supplied by Apple and ran all the updates, but that didn't change anything.
- I have a Macbook Pro 15' late 2012 running with bootcamp (mostly for light PC gaming) and with the new fall creators update for Windows 10, I have not been able to adjust the brightness of the screen, either using the FN+F2 shortcut, or using the built in windows screen brightness controls.
When I hear in the same sentence Macbook Pro i7 and black screen my mind goes straight to fried discrete Gpu, but I hope this is not the case. Drivers get loaded during booting process, do not just get stuck into the Gpu, thus the bad driver idea can probably be discarded for good. MacBook Pro 15' Unibody Mid 2012. Boot Camp has been what I have been using and rather successfully. I have a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro with i7 chip and 8G of RAM. Things run OK, but I find that you need grab video card drivers to stay up to date and maximize performance. The default ones that are part of the Boot Camp installation (you need to download) are not adequate. And does 'download windows support software' in the macos bootcamp utility update the drivers without needing a flash drive? I have a 16' macbook pro with macos 10.15.2 and windows 10 pro installed via the bootcamp assistant.
Do you find that BootCamp assistant download is stuck or or fails or could not continue?
The brute force solution: it's a darned large download, so physically take your machine to somewhere with a very fast internet connection that can download 600MB - 1GB in a couple of minutes. There, you're done.
For the rest of us, there are 2 options:
The simple solution – recommended – is to use this list of Windows driver download links for Macs with OS X Mountain Lion (which includes all retina display macs) or Lion, Snow Leopard or Leopard. That's about everything back to 2007.
There are also older links here, but they appear to be redundant -- the Mountain Lion file covers Mac models going back to Leopard.
There are also older links here, but they appear to be redundant -- the Mountain Lion file covers Mac models going back to Leopard.
Finally, the DIY solution: Work out for yourself which download link you need.
The DIY way to find your BootCampESD.pkg download link from the sucatalog
Not for the faint-hearted.
My steps to download the Lion or Mountain Lion drivers were as follows:
How to Manually Download Windows Drivers for Macs Running BootCamp 4 or BootCamp 5
Bootcamp Download Windows Camp Macbook Pro Dark Screen 10
- Download from apple the http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog file. Don't double-click it, that won't help.
- Instead, open it in a text editor or word processor.
- Search for each occurrence -- as at August 2012 there were 6 -- of BootCampESD.pkg. For instance, the one I needed is http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/33/54/041-2011/pRtCDYcWShMLxFggy3TzFzmfnnWQNFQBfJ/BootCampESD.pkg
- Notice in each such URL, the /041-2011/ or similar /041-XXXXX/ bit of it.
- Below each such occurrence, notice a URL for a file with the same 041-XXXXX in it and ending in English.dist, e.g. 041-2011.English.dist
- Paste the URL for each such English.dist file into your browser and open the Url. Here's a list of them:
- Search for the Model Identifier for your Mac. For instance MacBookPro5,2 or Macmini4,1 or whatever
- For instance the 041-2011 file contains these models: MacBook2,1 MacBook3,1 MacBook4,1 MacBook5,1 MacBook5,2 MacBook5,3 MacBook6,1 MacBook7,1 MacBookAir1,1 MacBookAir2,1 MacBookAir3,1 MacBookAir3,2 MacBookPro2,1 MacBookPro2,2 MacBookPro3,1 MacBookPro4,1 MacBookPro5,1 MacBookPro5,2 MacBookPro5,3 MacBookPro5,4 MacBookPro5,5 MacBookPro6,1 MacBookPro6,2 MacBookPro7,1 MacBookPro8,1 MacBookPro8,2 MacBookPro8,3 MacPro1,1 MacPro2,1 MacPro3,1 MacPro4,1 MacPro5,1 Macmini2,1 Macmini3,1 Macmini4,1 iMac5,1 iMac6,1 iMac7,1 iMac8,1 iMac9,1 iMac10,1 iMac11,1 iMac11,2 iMac11,3 iMac12,1 iMac12,2
- How do you know your Model Identifier? Open System Information, and look in the Hardware Overview section. i.e. click Apple menu -> About this Mac -> More Info… -> Report -> Hardware -> and now read down the Hardware Overview looking for 'Model Identifier:'
- Having found your 041-XXXXX number, download the BootCampESD.pkg url that has your number in it. I try to keep the page at bootcamp-driver-download up to date with all the pkg download URLs.
- Be patient as it's probably 600MB.
- Once your pkg is downloaded, double click it and install to a folder on your hard drive so you know where to find it.
- The folder contains a nest of folders, the last of which contains a dmg disk image file. Double click to open. Voila. Here are your Windows installer files. Again, the page at bootcamp-driver-download has pictures to help.
- Copy them to a thumb drive or a burnable CD or something. The point here is that you need the somewhere that a new install of windows with only minimal drivers can read them. NB, it's still 660MB or more, so it's a full CDs worth of burning time.
- You can now proceed with Boot Camp assistant Windows installation, which will eventually reboot your machine for startup in Windows.
- Once you're in Windows, run the installer that you saved to CD or thumb drive.
- Done. Marvel as all your Apple hardware now works nearly as well as it does in Mac OS X.