Can I use external Apple keyboard on Windows 10 PC?

Guys, a quick update. I was able to play with your suggested setup this weekend. I followed this tutorial on how to install the Bootcamp driver. (And apart from that silly thing renaming my drive C into "bootcamp" it didn't seem to have done much.)

So after a reboot (that had it's own issues, but I'll get to it later) the Apple keyboard was recognized and worked for 95% of keys. I didn't have the issue like others experienced with mixed up @ and # keys, etc. It all worked really well.

I then followed this tutorial on configuring it with the Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4 app. But unfortunately that didn't go well. Maybe I'm just not understanding how it works. Let me explain:

When I loaded it up, the app showed as such:



But if you look at the Apple keyboard, it looks like this -- as you see the entire extended part of the keyboard is missing from the app!






My main goal with using that key mapping app was to map keys I circled in red above, namely:

fn key ---> Insert
f13 (above it) ----> Print Screen


So what am I missing there?


And there's another issue, which is probably even bigger than the one above. When I boot up that PC with just the Apple keyboard plugged in via USB, the post gives me this and stops the boot:






So guys, any ideas?

Guys, whoever reads this DO NOT install Apple Bootcamp. I did and it took me two days to restore my computer back to normal.

I noticed that my backups stopped working and the Volume Shadow Copy was giving out an initialization error. So one thing lead to another. Until I eventually found out the root cause. Evidently the Bootcamp installer installs their HFS file system driver. (The unresolved question that only Apple probably knows, is why do I need a file system driver for the keyboard? But that's beside the point.)

I was able to discover it with the Autoruns tool. See these two:





And then while trying to remove it I discovered another nasty surprise. Anyone can spot it?






So yeah ... I had to use the System Restore.

Then, at least I'm at square one, having my backups working again!

PS. Note to self: NEVER EVER install Apple software on a Windows device!

PS2. I'm posting these error codes so that someone else can find this post through a Google search. Volume Shadow Copy was failing with these two error messages:

• 0x80070001 (Invalid Function)
• VSS error 0x80042306

I found AppleHFS.sys driver causes these vss errors on Apple hardware also when running Windows.

You could try unticking it in autoruns to disable it and rebooting if (for whatever reason) you decided to reinstall it. That seems to work.

Yeah, no problem. I wasn't aware of it either. It's just that -- you live and learn.

I'll keep looking for a solution and if I find one I'll post it here.

I have been running Bootcamp for several years for my Apple Keyboard from Win 7 to Win 10 never had any issues. As long as you get the Apple keyboard driver from within Windows which is there by default it supports it works like a dream

Here's my conclusion of this saga.

First. The thing I learned is that there's absolutely no need to even touch Apple Bootcamp installer to make the external Apple keyboard work on a Windows 10 device. I tried it on a brand new installation of Windows 10. And if I just plug in that Apple keyboard into a USB-3 port, it works right out of the box. So again, no need to download & install any Apple drivers.

One needs to enable support for legacy USB devices in UEFI/BIOS to make it recognize Apple keyboard during POST.

Then additionally, if you want to have PrintScreen, Ins and NumLock keys you'll need to remap some of the Apple keyboard's F keys. There's many janky looking apps out there that try to do this. I personally went with this (manual) approach:

1. First you need to have scan codes for the keys to remap. I used this software for that. It doesn't require any installation and is very simple.

2. Then I'm basically remapping it as such:

F13 -> Insert
F15 -> PrintScreen
F16 -> NumLock

So first plug in Windows keyboard and get scan codes to map to:



Then plug in the Apple keyboard and get scan codes to map from:




3. Then following this guide from Microsoft add this key using RegEdit:






It is basically this binary data:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]

"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,04,00,00,00,52,e0,64,00,37,e0,66,00,\
45,00,67,00,00,00,00,00

The encoding is this:

- 1st and 2nd DWORD (or 4-byte sequence) are 0's.
- 3rd DWORD is the number of keys to remap + 1. So I set it to 4.
- Then each DWORD is broken down as such:
... Byte 0: scan code we're mapping to.
... Byte 1: (for byte 0) use E0 for extended key, 00 for normal.
... Byte 2: scan code we're mapping from.
... Byte 3: (for byte 2) use E0 for extended key, 00 for normal.
- Last is a DWORD of all 0's.

4. Reboot and it's done.