Boot Camp 3.0 Plays Nicer with Windows
Posted 08/27/2009 at 10:28am
| by Arvind Srinivasan
2) Device Drivers
One of the biggest problems with Windows on a Unibody Macbook, previously, was that the new button-less track pad wreaked havoc on the Windows experience. Right clicking was near impossible, and tap to click was a nightmare. Furthermore, there were rarer problems (that we experienced) wherein conflicts between the track pad driver and the NVIDIA graphics drivers would cause random lockups and crashes.
Furthermore, in Windows, the AirPort drivers would cause random audio feedback and dropouts. With the new drivers included in Boot Camp 3.0, all of these problems go away, and Apple has increased the granularity of control for the track pad. However, there are still shortcomings. Though there is now a control panel to make the right side of the track pad secondary click, you can’t enable three or four finger gestures with it, meaning that the synaptic track pad functionality is unnecessarily crippled. They have also made Windows more compatible with Cinema Displays (an additional control panel), if you are so lucky to have one.

Click to embiggen
3) Increased Stability
With this release, Apple has committed itself to the next iteration of Windows, and has increased Windows 7’s stability under BootCamp. Even just making most things work under Windows would have been a major accomplishment, but the new features will make running Windows in a dedicated partition, versus a VM, a better decision than ever.