Topic: Bootcamp 3.0 and DPC Latency Issues
My initial foray into Bootcamp 3.0 has ended with failure, and I am now restoring my Windows partition from a cloned backup - thank you Winclone!
Bootcamp 3 is installed from the Snow Leopard installation disk under Windows (XP SP3 in my case), and consists largely of newer drivers for all the Mac hardware. I found that the drivers installed by Bootcamp 3.0 for the NVDIA video and RealTek audio hardware (earlier versions were troublesome) are fairly recent, but not as new as the versions of the drivers that can be found on their respective company's websites. Even after updating those drivers (which has usually resulted in reduced DPC Latency performance in the past under Bootcamp 2.0), I was still getting huge DPC spikes when viewing the system's performance in DPC Latency Checker. My first thought was that the Apple Keyboard Manager (KBDMGR.EXE) got reinstalled, but I couldn't find it in the Windows Task Manager, or MSCONFIG, so maybe Apple has renamed this program which typically causes large DPC spikes every 30 seconds or so. To tell the truth, I deleted KBDMGR.EXE from my system a very long time ago - so long that I can no longer remember where it was located in the first place, and using Windows' Search utility yields no results with that file name. I thought that Bootcamp would re-install it, but I can't find it for the life of me. I have never used Timur's Keyboard Manager switcher, but I'd imagine that this might not work anymore following a Bootcamp 3.0 install.
I have a Windows utility program that is designed to examine all device drivers and search out the newest updates for them all (Driver Checker), and found that after doing the Bootcamp 3.0 install, there were several Intel drivers that needed updating, so clearly Apple has included drivers that may have been current some months ago, but have now been superseded by more recent issues.
I'm sure there is a host of other optimizations that can be done to bring Bootcamp 3's performance to the status I was able to manage previously, but really, who needs the aggravation? If there are no clear problems with running my Bootcamp 2.0 install with updated hardware drivers, then I'm thinking that I may just leave well enough alone.
At least until Windows 7 becomes a necessity for running a future version of Pyramix...
Has anyone else had any differing experiences with Bootcamp 3.0?
https://LockwoodARS.com
Fireface 800, Firmware 2.77
Drivers: Win10, 3.125; Mac, 3.36