Making the Apple Keyboard Play Nice with Windows
After a long, long love affair with Logitech, I’ve finally finished a slow migration toward Apple’s input devices. Their aluminum keyboard took some getting used, but once I’d grown accustomed to it on my Macbook, I decided to get one for my Windows 7 desktop. It seemed like everything was working perfectly until I pressed the mute button; nothing happened. Volume down? No go. In fact, all of the media keys (volume up/down, mute, play/pause, etc.) refused to do anything. For whatever reason, SharpKeys and other keyboard mapping utilities don’t recognize Apple’s media keys. The solution, it turns out, is to install a pair of Bootcamp files from your Mac OS X installation DVD.
Here are the steps that worked for me. I’m running Windows 7 x64 with a 2010 Apple aluminum keyboard, and have a Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installation disc. As always, your mileage may vary:
- Insert your Mac OS X installation disc. If it tries to auto-run anything, cancel it.
- Open Windows Explorer, right-click on your DVD drive, and select Open from the menu.
- Navigate to the Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple folder.
- Copy BootCamp.msi (or BootCamp64.msi for x64 systems) to your desktop.
- Copy AppleKeyboardInstaller.exe (or x64/AppleKeyboardInstaller64.exe for x64 systems) to your desktop.
- Use a tool such as 7-zip to extract the AppleKeyboardInstaller.exe file.
- With 7-zip, can you do this by right-clicking on the file and selecting 7-Zip->Extract to “AppleKeyboardInstaller”.
- Navigate to the folder you extracted AppleKeyboardInstaller.exe to and run the DPInst.exe file to install the Apple keyboard driver for Windows.
- Click Start->All Programs->Accessories, right-click on Command Prompt, and select Run as administrator.
- In the command prompt, type “cd Desktop“.
- Install BootCamp by typing “BootCamp.msi” (or “BootCamp64.msi” for x64 systems) in the command prompt.
- Once the installation completes, you can delete the files on your desktop and remove the Mac OS X installation disc. Reboot your computer and enjoy your new media keys!
December 3rd, 2010 at 1:54 pm
I recently used an image off of your Meme cats images and received a somewhat angry response to that. I just wanted to apologize. I truly didn’t mean any harm from it. Lesson learned, I need to be sure and give credit where credit is due! Your stuff is awesome. Thanks for sharing it with all of us!
December 3rd, 2010 at 1:57 pm
No need to apologize; I’m not sure who made that comment, but it certainly wasn’t me.
December 24th, 2010 at 4:28 am
Hey, thanks dude. This worked perfectly for me. only when I typed cd Desktop in the command prompt he didn’t do anything, but when I restarted I was able to use the media keys, without even doing step 8 9 and 10.
December 1st, 2011 at 11:41 am
When I run DPInst.exe the wizard says I can’t complete installation because it can’t find any drivers for my machine. Any ideas?
December 1st, 2011 at 12:01 pm
Ignore my previous comment. I’m a num nut because I only extracted DPInst.exe and not the rest of the folder. It installed fine if it can find the files it needs in the folder it’s in.
However, the Boot Camp Control Panel fails to start because it gets hung up trying to access the Start Up disk stuff. How did you get around this?
February 12th, 2012 at 1:25 pm
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