Newer Apple Video Drivers? What to do?

Are there newer video drivers for the 8600gt that comes with the MBP? My drivers are stable...but all my games tell me to update my graphics drivers. But I am nervous about using laptopvideo drivers...or whatever they are called. I hear a lot of feedback about messing up your computer using them. But I want to extra boost the newer drivers provide..like the newer nvidia drivers for crysis or bioshock. Neither of which runs well under windows with my stock drivers.

 

Apple hasnt updated their video drivers since beta of bootcamp.

Upgrading the the video drivers from laptopvideo2go might seem daunting, but theres tutorials there on how to do it.

For me it took a while to figure out, cause I wasnt reading the tutorials, but all you have to do to fix the problems is just run the driver cd that you used to make bootcamp. That resets the drivers back to the original ones and you can try again.

 

I'm pretty sure the OP was talking about updating drivers through Windows. As such, the process couldn't be simpler, but you have to make sure to clean out the old driver files before installing new ones in order to minimize the chance of conflicts.

Once laptopvideo2go is back online (they're in the midst of a server move right now), download a driver from the 169.xx series. I'm using 169.09 on XP Home with no problems in the games I'm currently playing (F.E.A.R. and HL2). They also work great on the Crysis demo.

When you download the driver, you also need to download the modified .inf file that corresponds to the version you're downloading. On the LV2Go site, just right-click on the modded .inf link and save target as. Once you have the driver, double click it and extract all the files to a separate folder. Copy the modded .inf you downloaded to where you extracted the driver files, overwriting the existing version.

Once you've done that, head over to Guru3D.com and download/install Driver Sweeper. Once you've done that, do the following:

1) Use control panel, add/remove programs and uninstall the NVIDIA display driver. Your system will do its thing.

2) When it prompts you to reboot, do so. Select your Windows partition from the boot loader like you always do. When the screen goes black the first time, start pressing the F8 key repeatedly. After a few seconds, the Windows boot menu should appear. Boot into safe mode.

3) After booting into safe mode, the add new hardware wizard should pop up. Cancel out of it. Run Driver Sweeper, making sure to only select the NVIDIA display driver for cleaning. Once DS has done its thing, reboot.

4) Boot your system into Windows normally. Again, the add new hardware wizard will come up. You can cancel out of it and use the installer program included with the drivers to update, but I've had issues where it would freeze up my system occasionally. That's why I prefer to manually install driver via the add new hardware wizard. Just point the wizard to the folder where the drivers are, Windows will complain that the drivers aren't signed, but ignore it, the files will copy anyway.

5) When it's done, reboot again, and you're good to go.

Whenever you need to update or downgrade your drivers, just follow these same steps.

 

Than you, I will try that!

 

Apple released these last week...might be worth trying out:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306891

 

Has anyone tried these new apple drivers? I do not have bootcamp 2.0. I am still using the earlier version since I did not purchase leopard.

 

Strange, I never needed to use Driver Sweeper or reboot to safe mode for that matter =) I just remove old drivers from Add/Remove programs, reboot and install new drivers with Have Disk option. That's it

 

You don't need to use Driver Sweeper every time. You also don't need to uninstall the older drivers either. These steps are just recommended for the best results. I rarely use Driver Sweeper, but always uninstall the old driver first.

You don't have to kill your F8 key, just press and hold down the F8 key until the Safe Boot Menu appears.

 

you should reboot and use driver cleaner, you are not gonna get the best results if there are still pieces from the old driver install still there

 

It depends on how often you update your drivers though. Windows can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 1.5 min (unbelievable in this day and age) to boot up and safe mode can be even slower than that. If you're updating graphic drivers, you'd probably at least reboot twice, not counting the whole safe mode thing. Having to spend nearly 5 minutes just to reboot and install something is pretty much unacceptable to me.

So maybe every few months before a really big driver update you might feel obligated to do the whole driver cleaner routine, but otherwise, eh...why bother