Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Can you install Nvidia's new official laptop drivers on Macbook?

W

Wolfpup

macrumors 68040
Original poster
I don't see that the Macbook is excluded, but I remember someone claiming they don't work, only the 9600GT in the Pro.
 
The Macbook isn't supported, only the Macbook Pro. If you download the drivers and try to run it you'll get an error message saying that no supported hardware was found.
 
Okay, thanks! I was toying with the idea of getting the cheapest LED backlit Macbook and using it as a PDA/main computer for a while, but I guess that won't work for me.
 
Any idea if you can just point the device manager at an inf file in the directory the drivers extract, and install them that way? (As you could with Nvidia notebook hardware under XP?)

Unfortunately that DOESN'T work with ATi hardware on 64-bit Vista, but Nvidia seems to have more of a 'wink wink, nudge nudge' approach to using their regular drivers on mobile hardware.

I know there are those third party work arounds, but I'm not comfortably with them for something that major (I mean theoretically if they were malware of any sort, you'd be giving them total access to your system 🙁 )
 
EDIT: Yeah, I just downloaded and extracted both the notebook and regular Nvidia reference drivers, and they all include an inf file, and look just like the XP drivers do...you probably could get away with a force install. (Unlike ATi's 🙁 ) Not sure if the fact it's integrated would change that though. I mean in the case of XP, you'd have to point it at that INF file. It would claim it couldn't find drivers for the device, but you could tell it to use them anyway, pick a GPU similar to the one in the notebook, and that would work just fine-to the point where it actually would still know it's a mobile GPU, still have those related features, etc.)
 
Yes that works. You basically download it, run it, it will unzip the files to a directory you can choose and then it gives the error message about the hardware being unsupported. After that you can do the device manager thing and point it to the directory with the unzipped files and can force install it easily. No need to modify the .inf files and stuff if you take that approach.

However this is really more of a Windows on Mac issue so you probably should have posted this in the other forum.
 
tubbymac said:
Yes that works. You basically download it, run it, it will unzip the files to a directory you can choose and then it gives the error message about the hardware being unsupported. After that you can do the device manager thing and point it to the directory with the unzipped files and can force install it easily. No need to modify the .inf files and stuff if you take that approach.

However this is really more of a Windows on Mac issue so you probably should have posted this in the other forum.
Click to expand...

Thanks! Well that's great news. I may have to think about the 2Ghz Macbook after all (although the >2GB crash issues are a little scary 🙂 )

I figure maybe long term I could use iCal and the like as my PDA, and mid term I could use the system just fine for Blu Ray and my backlog of games (I mean some are running on the Quake 3 engine for crying out loud! 🙂 )

It is a cute little system 🙂
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back