Over the weekend I took the opportunity to upgrade my Boot Camp installation on my MacBook Pro to beta version 1.1. It all seemed to go fine until I got to the office this morning when I discovered that the ethernet port had become disabled but not only in Windows, in OS X as well.
I’m still not an expert in OS X so after a bit of flailing about logged a couple of questions on the Apple Support forums. No luck there, although people are very helpful. So I went into Windows debug mode. The obvious place to start were the new drivers installed as part of the 1.1 upgrade. First of all I uninstalled them all and then disabled every piece of software that I could before reinstalling.
Looking back now I think the root of the problem may well be my firewall (which is ZoneAlarm). Obviously this is running all the time but after disabling it, reinstalling the software and rebooting into OS X everything was back up and working. I remember when I did the initial Boot Camp install that Zone Alarm caused a BSOD in XP. So the moral of the story is that you need to shut down everything, and I mean everything when doing anything with Boot Camp.
Now that it’s all up and running things are much improved with support for the iSight, better key mapping and some power saving (although the battery life is still much better under OS X than Windows). I’d say that they are one more Beta release away from a marketable product.
Update: When I booted up this morning the same problem re-appeared. Yesterday’s solution didn’t work so I got a little more aggressive and completely removed ZoneAlarm and replaced it with Norton Internet Security. This seems to have worked today but if it breaks again I’ll continue updating here.
