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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Bootcamp>Win7? Anyone have any advice?
Jack Howard, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Central Jersey | NJ | USA | Posted: 8:18 AM on 11.11.09 |
->> I need to run a couple of Windows programs on my Macs, and am curious to hear what, if anything, people have to say about Win7 on their Intel Macs via Bootcamp.
and a related silly question, perhaps: The Bootcamp literature strongly suggests "Backing up your disk" before installing Windows. Is Time Machine backup sufficient, or should I be backing up another way in addition before running this install.
Thanks! |
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Jim Colburn, Photo Editor, Photographer
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McAllen | TX | USA | Posted: 10:07 AM on 11.11.09 |
| ->> Do you need Win 7 or would XP be enough? I've used Parallels with Windows XP (no need to re-boot with Parallels) for about a year and the combo (if you get an OEM version of Windows) would probably be cheaper than buying a copy of Win 7. |
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Michael J. Treola, Photographer
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Middletown | NJ | USA | Posted: 12:22 PM on 11.11.09 |
->> Jack - Parallels. No need to reboot from a different partition just to run windows and if I'm not mistaken BootCamp and Win7 don't play nice just yet.
Parallels imho has really matured as a product that last couple of releases and has never not performed the task I asked on the windows side. From applications to mounting drives, USB devices et. So for me its been great for my needs and the fact you run both OS's side by side is a huge time saving plus.
They just released version 5 - available as a trial. Try it.
http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
Tree |
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Max Simbron, Photographer, Assistant
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Phoenix | AZ | USA | Posted: 12:33 PM on 11.11.09 |
->> I'm running Boot Camp with Windows 7. Here are the big differences:
Boot Camp on the Mac side doesn't recognize 7, so you have to hold down the option key when booting to select your windows drive.
Windows 7 drivers are a bit scarce, so anything you don't find, you'll want to get the Vista drivers for (I run 64 bit so I needed Vista 64 bit drivers).
You need the boot camp update and Vista pack to get Windows 7 to boot into OS X via the Boot Camp Assistant.
Oh and you need to back up if you never ran Boot Camp before because you'll be repartitioning your hard drive if you choose the Macintosh HD to make a Boot Camp Partition. Repartitioning is easy but not necessarily safe. If your partitions blow up, you'll need to reinstall your mac OS (Leopard or Snow Leopard).
But aside from that, it was fairly painless. Windows 7 is certainly better than Vista, and XP never really supported the 14gb of ram I had, so 7 made the most sense for a new Boot Camp Partition.
Oh one last thing. No clue why, but Windows 7 took well over 15-17GB to install, so you may want to do more than a 32gb partition. |
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Jim Colburn, Photo Editor, Photographer
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McAllen | TX | USA | Posted: 5:28 PM on 11.11.09 |
->> "...aside from that, it was fairly painless..."
"Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" |
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Jack Howard, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Central Jersey | NJ | USA | Posted: 5:54 PM on 11.11.09 |
->> All in all, I'm thinking it might be easier if I just pick up a cheap ThinkPad and sell it once I'm done with the project I need it for...
Thanks, all. I appreciate it. |
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