Updated Bootcamp drivers (3.0)
I recently purchased a Macbook Pro 15″ (aluminum unibody version) and I love it. Since I do most of my web development under Windows (at least for now, this may change!), one of the first things I did was install Windows on a Bootcamp partition. I did this before upgrading the installed OS X operating system from Leopard (10.5) to Snow Leopard (10.6). This installed version 2.1 of the Bootcamp drivers for Windows. These drivers allow the Apple hardware to work under Windows, including the sound card, video, multi-touch trackpad (like enabling two-finger scrolling, right click, etc.) and more.
Most of the drivers worked very well but there was one very annoying thing — it seemed the sensitivity of the multi-touch trackpad was dialed up to eleven. I had enabled the dragging feature, which is designed to let you double-tap-and-hold in order to drag and drop, like to move an application window, or move an icon or drag/drop text while editing; The problem was I kept accidentally dragging stuff around my screen when all I wanted to do was move the mouse. Desktop icons kept getting lassoed or moved around on my screen; words were selected and moved around in documents that I was editing; background windows were getting activated and brought to the foreground while I was typing; it was really quite frustrating.
Every now and then, I’d look for updated drivers or look to see if I had missed a setting somewhere that could tune the trackpad sensitivity but I never found anything that really helped.
After an especially frustrating evening, I decided to look again. Googling revealed several references to the Bootcamp 3.0 drivers and it turns out they were supposed to come with Snow Leopard. I figured maybe I should insert my Snow Leopard DVD while booted into my Windows partition to see if there was something there mentioning an upgrade path. Sure enough, after inserted the DVD, the Bootcamp installer auto-started and prompted me to upgrade. After a few minutes, the installer asked to reboot the system.
The drivers are now updated to Bootcamp 3.0 and now my trackpad drivers are working much, much better. If only I had thought about this weeks ago! Not nearly as many accidental drag operations or stray clicks. Woohoo!
The only problem is that there is still no two-finger horizontal scrolling, only vertical scrolling. Hey, Apple, when can we get two-finger horizontal scrolling in Windows? Or is that one of the secret features you guys are saving for OS X in order to get folks to migrate? ;-)
