There is no reason to run window 7 on this as it is running xp inside of osx (via virtualbox) anyway, but this gives me a laptop for just about anything.
The target machine is a 15" macbook pro with 4 gig ram, 250gig hard drive, intel core 2 duo running at 2.4 ghz and nvidia 8600m GT dedicated graphics. To make it run full speed we decide to go the boot camp route.
Boot camp no longer requires a cd/dvd, you run the book camp app in the utilities folder and decide how much hard disk space to allot to windows. I choose 50 gig. It then asks you to insert the windows install media and runs the windows 7 installation program. You choose advanced or optional setup and select a partition. Windows will complain it cannot install there as it is not the right format. We select drive 0 partition 3 boot camp and click on the windows disk utility and format the partition as NTFS.
Windows then formats the partition, copies over it's numerous files and starts the install. This takes quite a bit of time so we start a quick game of civ2...
finally we get to the setup and create an account and get to the home network. Odd how the win7 gui reminds me of an earlier version of osx.
Ok it starts up but the isight is not working. Network is ok. I'll have to find the drivers for the macbook for win 7 tomorrow...ah, if you run windows update it gets the driver for the video and some other things.
Once installed it boots automatically into windows. In the old boot camp there was a control panel in windows to set the boot back to osx, i don't see it anymore so how to return to osx? I found it in the control panel, system and security.
Ah, here is a good guide:
http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/01/15/using-boot-camp-to-install-windows-7-on-your-mac-the-complete-walkthrough/ which says to do this:
Insert your OS X Leopard (or Snow Leopard) DVD. When prompted, select Run setup.exe. Note: If you’re using Snow Leopard and a message pops up saying “Remote Install Mac OS X”, close that window and eject the CD. Put the CD in again and this time select “Open folder to view files”, navigate to the Bootcampfolder, and run setup.exe.
Looks like this is needed in able to get back to osx - as windows probably toasts the existing boot loader (why you need to install windows 1st before linux on a dual boot machine). So we haul out the 10.6 retail box and insert the dvd.
Works as advertised. Remember to remove the snow leopard cd before rebooting.
When your Mac boots, hold down the Option key to select which Operating System you want to boot into.
There will be 2 hard drive icons shown, your apple one and a hard drive called windows. Select the windows drive. Next we install the apple bootcamp update by running Apple Software update in windows. This loads ver 3.1 which updates some of the drivers.
The macbook gets a little hot during all this updating, i have a fan control applet in osx that cranks up the fans - need to find something similar for winddoze.
Summary
Windows 7 ultimate on a macbook pro looks nice and is fast. I must say the Aero window manager is very nice looking.
How useful windows 7 is remains to be seen, but because work is a windows-centric IT place i have to use it sometimes, although there is no longer any compelling reason to do so. Many years ago a windows upgrade would have been exciting, today it is ho hum as everything i need can be done is Ubuntu or OSX and in fact there are things i do there that i can't do easily in windows without purchasing a lot of software or fiddling around in windows innards. During the years windows tried to take over the world with phones, zune's, xboxes and such it lost sight of updating it's os and many people left for better options. Wonder if it will get them back? Probably not - would you return to IE after many years on Firefox and Safari?
PS
Ran the windows experience index and got a score of: 5.1 which is caused by the slower hard drive, the other scores were all 5.9
1 comment:
The score of 5.1 is quite a bit less than the 6.9 of the dell 450 windows machine i build at xmas. Probably due to the difference in hard drive speed (4500 prm vs 7200 rpm) and the video card, Nvidia 8600 256mb in the mac pro and ATI HD xxxx 1gig in the dell 450. Both have the same 4 gig of ram.
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