Bootcamp Windows extremely unstable....useless!

[solbergg]

Hey all,

Installed boot camp windows on my first mac yesterday, so I am definitely lacking experience in this arena. I followed the installation instructions line by line though, so I'm not sure what could have gone wrong. The symptoms? Nothing operates as it should. Some examples:

Browsing the internet? Any site with even a little bit of flash crashes the browser

Playing a game? Installs fine, but will hang forever while loading

Changing the desktop background!? Can't even do this, I get a rundll32 failure and then ALOT of things go haywire.

I haven't tried much else because I figure if I'm using the windows side, its either to play a game, alt-tab to the internet occasionally while playing said game, and I hate the default XP background.

Some configuration details:

Late 2008 Aluminum Macbook
2.0 GHz
2 GB Ram
Windows XP Pro SP2, Upgraded to SP3 and all updates downloaded
Windows partition is NTFS 50 GB
Bootcamp 2.1

I let windows update as many drivers as it could, but I did have to manually install an update for the trackpad from Apple's site. Perhaps some more manual updates could cure my problems?

An additional note - I tested a flash site again. Interestingly enough, if I load up the site it will run fine until I move the cursor with the trackpad, then the browser immediately fails. So it looks like there are more kinks to be worked out with the trackpad drivers. Anyone else experience this? I've only tried flash in firefox, I think I'll give IE a try.

EDIT: Tried it in IE. Program did not crash, but flash just became a big blur when I scrolled.

 

[srl7741]

Did you install the OS X install DVD and load the Windows Drivers? See if that helps.

 

[solbergg]

Yeah, and I just did a repair of that to be sure, with no luck. I called apple, but they say its a windows problem so they won't help with it. I sort of understand that, but really this seems indicative of a driver issue rather than a problem within the windows software.

 

[Andy-V]

Sounds like it would be best if you reinstall windows again.

 

[solbergg]

Sounds like it would be best if you reinstall windows again.

Yeah, I did just that. The display settings problem is now gone, but the flash and game problems still exist.

 

[lucero1148]

boot camp windows

Hi
If I'm not mistaken Bootcamp is only specified to work with Windows XP sevice Pack 2. If it is upgraded to service pack 3 I think you're supposed to do that after you've installed service pack 2 and upgraded the drivers for bootcamp by installing the original leopard install disk.

I would re-install XP service pack 2 only and then see how it works.

 

[solbergg]

Hi
If I'm not mistaken Bootcamp is only specified to work with Windows XP sevice Pack 2. If it is upgraded to service pack 3 I think you're supposed to do that after you've installed service pack 2 and upgraded the drivers for bootcamp by installing the original leopard install disk.

I would re-install XP service pack 2 only and then see how it works.

Hi, and thank you for the tip. I actually did install with an SP2 disk and later updated it to SP3 through windows update (but only after adding the drivers from the OSX disk), so that is not the problem, unfortunately.

I sent in a technical help request to adobe about the flash issue, perhaps they might have some ideas.