Running Windows on a Mac, part 3: The complete how-to

22.10.2011

: The broadcom chip is present in most recent MacBooks, iMacs and Mac Minis. Station-Drivers.com has the latest drivers. Scroll down to the "Broadcom Wireless 802.11a/b/g/n controller" section and get the latest drivers for your OS.

: The Realtek audio chipset is also very commonly found in Macs. Unfortunately, again, the installation requires you to do some tinkering: Go to and download the latest Realtek HD Audio drivers. Make sure not to get the MSI installer, we need the extractable ZIP/EXE format -- you'll see why. Download and extract the file. Go to "Device Manager", double-click on "Sound, video and game controllers" and then "Realtek High Definition Audio". Go to the "Driver" tab, click "Update Driver" and point it to your downloaded directory. Hit "OK" to install these drivers! If you don't follow these steps and just go with the regular installer, you'll hear no audio out of your speakers -- it's likely one of those weird little Windows on a Mac issues.

I've talked about the drivers before. Thanks to a crippled BIOS emulation and some weird decisions on Apple's part, the storage controller runs with legacy IDE drivers instead of AHCI drivers, which makes for a noticeable loss in performance.

I've read pretty much everything there is to read on this issue and tested all the hacks that help you enable AHCI on your Mac or MacBook. Be warned: