This is by no means a difficult process, but prior to doing this, I had a few questions which were answered near perfectly by jumping in and setting up Windows 7 in Bootcamp. If you are thinking of dual-booting your Macbook Pro and getting the ultimate developer machine (or pretty much any task a modern computer can do) then read on. If you want your Macbook Pro to become a pretty decent gaming laptop, then again, you have come to the right place.
Frequently Thought Questions
Gaming performance.That shiny, rather lean machine can’t compete with a supersized Alienware, can it? Well, probably not, but compared to my Dell XPS M1730 – which has dual 8800M GTX graphics cards running in SLi, and hardware built for gaming, the Macbook Pro certainly does it’s best to keep up, however it can get HOT. VERY hot. The aluminium surface to the top left of the keyboard is enough to scald, and that was after about 6 minutes of trying out Supreme Commander 2, with a second monitor, on high settings. Call of Duty: Blackops however, ran for a good ten minutes without much heat. A few other games have ran without the fans screaming, or the Macbook negating the need for central heating, but I haven’t tried Crysis on it yet.
As for the Windows Experience Index, it scored a 5.9 without having run Windows Update, with the Hard Drive being the lowest value.
Macbook Pro early 2011 Windows Experience Index
File sharing. Both Windows and OS X can read each other’s files, but not write to them. If you are thinking of sharing, say, your Firefox and Thunderbird accounts between both operating systems, then think again – unless you store the files on an external disk. With that said, I can still share my virtual machines between both operating systems, which I will explain later. No, it is not some archaic process either.
Driver support. Hah. You might think that Apple wouldn’t put much effort into a competitor’s OS being installed on their precious machines would you? Actually they gave it a lot of thought, and every piece of hardware is a quick wizard install after first installing Windows. No running off to find drivers, no searching around for work-arounds and tweaks. Even peripherals such as the remote control, and Magic Mouse are supported. Not only does Apple’s display’s do good justice for Apple’s interface design, but they compliment Windows incredibly with their impressive colour, brightness, contrast, and pixel resolution. Windows 7, in it’s default blue glory, looks amazingly vibrant on the Macbook Pro.
Changing your mind. If Windows goes sour, is there a special process to remove it? Sure! Just delete it from the Bootcamp assistant in OS X. Job done. If you avoid activating Windows before the 30 day grace period, then you have not ‘sacrificed’ a licence key either.
Hard drive space. This isn’t as bad as any other machine I have dual booted. OS X has about 70GB left out of 500GB, whereas Windows gets the remaining 250GB. Even with a pretty strong Steam games catalogue, Windows has a lot of space to spare, and I am having a hard time using up the remaining 70GB given to OS X.
The Installation
Backup your important files. It is always tempting to leave this step out, but nothing is worse than having your files trapped on a system when you really need them. If your files are important to you, then they should be stored in more locations than just your hard drive by now. The following process was very smooth and I cannot see it going wrong, but backing up is a good habit to get in to, and the moment something does go wrong, you will thank yourself over and over that you left your machine running overnight to copy files.
Installing Windows 7 was easy. In OS X, run the Bootcamp assistant. It will ask you to print a manual, and ensure that you have the necessary drivers downloaded from a location it offers to take you to. If you have the installation disc that came with your Mac, then you can skip this step, as the drivers, for Bootcamp, are included on that disc. The final screen will let you resize the partitions to make room for Windows.
Next, the partitions will be saved, and if you are ready to install Windows, go ahead and click to install it. Otherwise come back later with the installation disc!
The Windows installation process is the same as usual, but one thing that might make you think twice, is that the Bootcamp partition, when asked where to install Windows to, will need to be formatted (click “more options”, then format). The only point to watch out for is that you definitely have the Bootcamp partition selected when doing this, and when clicking “Next” to install Windows.
When asked, do not tick “Activate Windows automatically” unless you are happy with your licence getting used before giving Windows a proper test.
Once you have gone through the user account setup, and are now looking at your fresh, clean Windows desktop, it is time to pop the Mac Installation DVD into your drive and run the setup wizard. This will install the necessary drivers for your Mac hardware.
Now run Windows Update. Done!
Switching between OS’es
I vaguely rememver older Mac’s providing the option of which Operating System to boot into when starting up. You do not get that option now. In fact, unless someone poked around your system, they would not know there is another Operating System installed.
The option to switch back to OS X is in the Windows taskbar – click the grey shiny diamond, then click “Restart in OS X”.
The option to switch to Windows from OS X is in System Preferences -> Startup Disk. Click the “Bootcamp” icon, and the subsequent “Restart in Windows” button. Note that whichever system is currently “active” will remain the primary OS until you change it, but if your machine is powered off and you wish to start in the alternate OS, you will have to go through the boot up process for the current OS first, then click to restart into the other OS.
The Development Setup – Think Virtual
I primarily develop in OS X. Whether it’s iOS development, or web development. OpenGL is quite fun to code in OS X too, but for Windows-specific development, obviously Windows is required.
My web development server is a virtual machine running Ubuntu Server Edition, tucked nicely away in Virtualbox, which can be installed on both Windows and OS X. The actual virtual machine files, including snapshots, run flawlessly if you copy them between the OS’es. “Unlimited” subdomains can be setup on the virtual server, and all you need to do is point your host OS’s DNS server to that of the virtual machine’s IP (and run DNSMasq or similar on the virtual server). I am not going to detail the Ubuntu side of things, but creating a new project is just a case of adding another Apache virtual server config to the pool of Apache configs in Ubuntu, and adding the relevant subdomain to /etc/hosts. Accessing the files is done through a samba share looking at /var/www, where all projects are added to.
The virtual server, as far as all other machines on the network are concerned, is just a machine sitting somewhere with it’s own IP. Any machine on the network can look at the projects as long as they set the DNS address to that of the virtual machine. The virtual machine in turn though, must be configured to use the router’s DNS as normal (edit /etc/networking/interfaces). Note that I set up the virtual machine to use a “Bridged” network interface, not the default NAT.
In the rare event that I do web development using the Windows partition, I go into OS X’s partition (already visible in “Computer”), and pull out the virtual server’s image, and run it from Windows’ partition. When the time comes to boot into OS X, then I just copy the file back from the Windows partition, to OS X (from within OS X).
The added bonus is that I can back up the entire development server in one easy copy to a NAS drive at home. If the Macbook ever does give up the ghost, then I can simply run Virtualbox on another machine, and the virtual server is singing again as if nothing happened.
The same concept above goes for the Linux desktop virtual machine (for the obligatory testing on web browsers under a Linux environment), and the Windows XP virtual machine for testing the never ashamed to die IE6.
Obligatory Problem List
Whilst problems are rare, there are a few things to bear in mind.
- The Apple Magic Mouse has a more fiddly scroll. OS X does a good job of smoothing the scrolling of this mouse, Windows does not. Any other mouse is of course perfectly fine.
- The keyboard may lose it’s keyboard layout when you run Windows Update. For example, on a UK keyboard, the speech mark, and @ symbol switch around.