Wireless Solution For Windows Vista On A Macbook
If you’re having problems getting a Boot Camp installation of Windows Vista to recognize your wireless card, I may have a solution for you.
I wrote once before about installing Vista on a MacBook, but at the time the main purpose for doing so was to test the new Office 2007 suite so I never really tried to get online or do much with Vista. I then used Parallels to migrate my partition over to a virtual drive.
Since then I decided that for software testing purposes it would be better to have a native install of Vista rather than a virtualized one. I used this as an excuse to reinstall everything, including OS X, which all went off without a hitch.
I downloaded Boot Camp from the Apple site and installed the Boot Camp Assistant. I then used the assistant to partition off a bit of my hard drive, popped in the Vista CD and everything went swimmingly for the initial installation.
Drivers, however, are another story. The disc that Boot Camp burns turned out to be useless for me, though I was able to get the keyboard drivers installed using this tutorial (also worth grabbing is the autohotkey file at the bottom of the tutorial which will let you turn Apple-click into right-click since Apple still refuses to use two-button trackpads).
I was able to connect to the internet via Ethernet out of the box, but the one thing that just wasn’t working was the wifi. I searched and scoured for anyone who’d tackled the issue and quickly realized that for most people the Apple drivers seem to work fine, even if you have to extract them yourself.
However, those of us with Core 2 Duo Macbooks (and I presume Macbook Pros) have a different wireless chip so the drivers currently bundled with Boot Camp don’t work. After several hours of frustration I ran across this brilliant tidbit by a poster named Ernie Soffronoff on the MacInTouch forums.
Soffronoff points out that, while there are no official drivers from Apple or Atheros, the same Atheros chipset is used in some of IBM’s Thinkpads and there’s an Windows XP driver for the Thinkpads.
I downloaded the driver and installed it successfully. Soffronoff says that after he double-clicked to install the driver nothing happened and then “Vista came up and asked if I wanted to try to run the installer again with ‘recommended settings’ — I said OK and this time it ran with no problem.” I didn’t have that issue, mine worked the first time — YMMV.
Once I restarted Vista a notice came up saying a new device had been installed. I was then able to connect via wifi without a problem — sweet.
So there you have it, if you’ve been having problems getting Vista and wifi working on your Macbook Core 2 Duo, give the IBM drivers a try. It seems to work, the speeds aren’t quite as good as what I get with the OS X drivers, but it’s useable and seems to be perfectly stable. Hopefully at some point Apple will upgrade the driver package in Boot Camp to offer better support, but in the mean time this will have to do.
Note that this is certainly not supported by any of the companies involved and could conceivably do very bad things to your system, though I doubt it.
