Wednesday 21 November 2012

Windows 8 Pro on an early 2009 iMac 21.5 (Core 2 Duo)

A couple of weeks back I thought I'd have a go writing a Windows Store App.  To do this requires Windows 8.  At the time I was running Windows 7 Home Premium on an early 2009 iMac 21.5 (Core 2 Duo).  This had been installed using Boot Camp including install Boot Camp assistant and the drivers supplied by Apple.

To upgrade to Windows 8 I wanted to avoid a re-installation of all my apps. and data etc so I went with an in place upgrade.  This all seemed to work properly and soon I was running Windows 8 and could access the Windows Store App templates from Visual Studio.  However, soon after Windows 8 kept crashing, well freezing.  It got to the point that after every reboot I'd be lucky to get 5 minutes of up time between each freeze.

Given that Apple haven't provided Windows 8 drivers yet this wasn't exactly a surprise.  I decided to try and work around this by rebooting to OS X and using VMWare Fusion to access the Boot Camp partition.  Whilst rebooting in OS X I managed to corrupt the Windows installation.  I use a non-Apple wireless keyboard (as I need the insert, delete, home & end plus the easily accessible cursor keys for VS development) so holding down Alt to select the OS to boot into didn't work.  When I realized it was going back into Windows I just turned the machine off.  After a couple of times the Windows installation was toast!  To get back to the point of trying Fusion I had to do a fresh Windows install.  In this case installing a minimal Windows 7 installation: just enough to allow the download of Windows 8.  I then installed Windows 8 using the preserve nothing option.

Having now gone through the steps I wanted to avoid I decided to give the new installation a go via direct boot, i.e. no Fusion.  That was two weeks ago.  Since then I've re-installed all the apps. and my personal data and (fingers crossed) haven't had a single crash.  As the freezes were usually happening during some graphical operation e.g. a status bar updating I assumed the fault probably lay with the video drivers.  I didn't install Boot Camp assistant and in particular the Windows 7 drivers from OS X disc.  Well, I did install one.  After a while I noticed I wasn't getting any sound even though all the audio drivers and hardware claimed they were happy.  Eventually I installed by the Cirrus Logic driver which made the speakers work. I haven't gone anywhere near the NVIDIA drivers.

So, the whole point of this post is for those who run Windows via Boot Camp on early iMacs and want to run Windows 8 then perhaps a fresh install (or maybe uninstall the Boot Camp supplied drivers prior to upgrade) is probably the way to go.