Dual Booting Win7

[Mike Sullivan]

Anyone on here running a newer Macbook and able to dual boot Win7? I'm going to be selling my MSI (possibly) to purchase a 2012 15" Macbook Pro for daily use, gaming, and for audio production. I plan on using the Mac OSX side for music and audio production, and using the Win7 side for gaming (mainly Battlefield 3). I'll be swapping the Superdrive out for an SSD for all my apps, while using the standard HD for storing music and such. Anyone having any issues so far and can recommend if running Win7 through Bootcamp is easier, or to just do a complete separate install? Thanks!

[Mackan]

Not sure what you mean by separate install, but running Windows 7 through Boot Camp means a separate install. Boot Camp is nothing more than Apple assisting you to create the Windows 7 partition (run Boot Camp Assistant in OS X to get started), and providing you with drivers for their hardware.

A lot of people are dual booting for gaming, and now a days it's all working fine. Trouble has been some of Apple's drivers for Windows, they can be rather low quality sometimes, and Apple rarely updates them. The trackpad driver is maybe the most famous. It's rather bad compared to the OS X driver. There is a third party driver called TrackPad++, being better. You might have to download the newest video drivers from Nvidia as well, to get best performance. It's recommended you download newer drivers from the hardware vendors, whenever possible. I remember one time the Boot Camp audio driver didn't work for some MacBook Pro model, and people had to sit and wait for Apple to provide a fixed one, which they eventually did. Rather frustrating...

There's been other not so well known issues with running Windows on Apple hardware. I specifically recall that hard drives only run in IDE mode when booted via BIOS emulation under Boot Camp, and not AHCI. This slows down the performance of the hard drive. But I think that Apple maybe fixed that in their latest Boot Camp revision. Another problem was low transfer speeds for USB.

Maybe someone with a 15'' 2012 model can chime in and tell if he had some specific problem (such as throttling of the video card which may affect you directly). Or you might want to visit Apple's own forums to confirm.

[Shelltoe]

If you want to run ab BIOS install there shouldn't be a difference in using BootCamp Assistent or not. As far as I know there are no problems at all using Win7. There still might be some drawbacks regarding USB and HDD speed but I can't comment on it right now. Maybe someone with Win7 will tell you. I'm currently running Win 8 in EFI mode (without bootcamp of course as it forces BIOS mode).

Win8 in EFI has some bugs (No internal sound and Intel HD Drivers) but I'm able to use the Intel HD with basic display drivers and shut down Nvidia GT 650m which saves alot of battery if I don't need the graphics power. Actually I'm pretty close to enabling Optimus but I'm stuck with those bugged drivers for now.

Have a look the eGPU forum for lots of information aswell.

As a sidenote: be sure to get a quadcore one if you want to run Battlefield 3

[v1monkie]

My friend with an iMac uses Boot Camp with Windows XP with no problems. We also have a MacBook Pro 13" with Virtual Box from Oracle. That works just fine and you can even use virtual box within Mac OS; you don't have to select at boot time. It will just run as another application.

[tdxxxg]

The separate install is pretty much bootcamp. Definately recommend upgrading to ssd but if you are partitioning your ssd, i'd go for a minimum of 256gb capacity. Music and audio production should be fine on the pro since most programs like garageband are single threaded, battlefield can run, but the gpu on the mbp 15 isn't ideal for gaming and will probably run hot.

[Hamed Owji]

In other words there is no virtualization involved with Bootcamp, Its just an installer guide and boot loader I believe.

[radiantsync]

I had a MacBook 15-inch mid-2010 model up until recently and BootCamp worked great. Not sure what GPU is in the 2012 model, but I was able to even overclock my 330M to get some extra gaming power out of it while on Windows (with modified NVidia drivers). The GPU will get very hot though, whether you OC or not, so be aware of that.

[dreammed]

macbook series pro,air fully support windows 7 sure but some series can't install windows 8 like model 2009

if u buy new model 2012 i think u can use it sure no problem run with bootcamp of mac

or if u run virtual like vmware or parallel desktop it quite slow for game

bootcamp is best choice

[KazPinkerton]

In other words there is no virtualization involved with Bootcamp, Its just an installer guide and boot loader I believe.

That's correct. There's an OS X-side app that helps prepare Windows install media, and Apple supplies some drivers, but that's it.

You might want to look into some fan control apps for OS X, though. Sometimes Windows doesn't know when to speed up the fans and it'll get rather hot, but if you set the fan to a high speed first, and then reboot to Windows, the high speed will persist until you go back to OS X and turn it back down.

[yuyue]

buy a copy of Parallels Desktop 8. You can use windows inside OSX. But be sure to max out ram when you're buying your mac.

[zoalord]

buy a copy of Parallels Desktop 8. You can use windows inside OSX. But be sure to max out ram when you're buying your mac.

yueyue beat me to it. after you bootcamp you can use parallels or VMware to open up the bootcamp volume from within the mac. Obviously gaming doesn't work so well that way, but its cool for updates and just running minimal x86 software

[zredstar]

bootcamp is not friendly, I would grab a copy of parallels and run windows inside of OS X.

[ScaryFatKidGT]

That's correct. There's an OS X-side app that helps prepare Windows install media, and Apple supplies some drivers, but that's it.

You might want to look into some fan control apps for OS X, though. Sometimes Windows doesn't know when to speed up the fans and it'll get rather hot, but if you set the fan to a high speed first, and then reboot to Windows, the high speed will persist until you go back to OS X and turn it back down.

Mine actually runs cooler in windows it seems? I do like how the volume controls and everything work just like in osx

I had a MacBook 15-inch mid-2010 model up until recently and BootCamp worked great. Not sure what GPU is in the 2012 model, but I was able to even overclock my 330M to get some extra gaming power out of it while on Windows (with modified NVidia drivers). The GPU will get very hot though, whether you OC or not, so be aware of that.

Hmmm how did you do this? The 650M in a 2012 15" is like 6x faster than a 320 or 330m

buy a copy of Parallels Desktop 8. You can use windows inside OSX. But be sure to max out ram when you're buying your mac.

Actually only do this if your getting an air or retina if your getting a 2012 non retina just get the 4gb then put in 16gb of your own from OWC or something, wayyyy cheaper.

[nibrocfd]

I've used bootcamp and installed Windows 7 on my 2012 13" macbook pro. Bootcamp was extremely intuitive and I had no issues with the install.

[jmp473]

I've just recently tried VMware Fusion, Virtual Box, and now Bootcamp. Could not connect Windows to the internet through Fusion or Virtual Box but with Bootcamp it was automatic. Bootcamp is primarily drivers and helper software to make Windows function with Apple's hardware. It requires a go-between external drive formatted as MS-DOS (FAT32) (Apple's exact terminology) this format is accessible to both OS X and Windows. I used an old drive I already had which may have been the source of many of my difficulties - a new cheap USB flash drive would probably have been much better.

Knowing what I know now, I would install Windows in it's own partition without BootCamp first, to see if my hardware functioned OK and proceed from there. Wish too, that I had made the Windows partition at least 40GB, as 30GB is not going to be enough. Windows 7 (64) alone plus minimum security software and updates etc is taking up 27 GB.

[dhe95]

usually you would want to do bootcamp since windows can't read from gpt partitions

[simonmpoulton]

usually you would want to do bootcamp since windows can't read from gpt partitions

I presume you mean windows can't read HFS+ formatted partitions. The GPT partitioning format has been supported since vista and is now used as standard on the new Windows 8 machines.

Bootcamp is easy to use assuming you know how to install windows from scratch, if you don't know how to install windows you will struggle with it.

[herm]

This topic is getting somewhat long in the tooth but it is clearly of lasting interest. So, with some hesitation, this is my experience of multibooting a Mac - a Mac Pro (early 1008 to be exact) - but the same results would be possible a fortiori on more recent Macs.

The whole business of booting several OSs on Macs is a real cottage industry ( take a look on You Tube for a nice assortment of methods). But for serious practical details to run Linux, in particular, on Mac Pros look for blog@ eriktrips and references therein - very entertaining. Also look for blog glandium.org and many others. The Ubuntu forums are also very informative.

I am talking here of running OSs natively on Macs, that is, not using the rEFInd loader by Rod Smith though it is also excellent and Smiths website is packed with useful info on multibooting Macs.

The reason for the emphasis on Linux is that Windows 7 and 8 and 8.1 are very easy to install on Macs particularly if Bootcamp is used as discussed above. But I have installed Windows 7 directly on Mac Pro after completely deleting the Mac OSX system from the hard disk: no problem. Linux is slightly trickier but I have found that the more recent versions understand EFI booting - used by Macs - (as opposed to MBR booting) and are therefore also fairly easy to install with a minimum amount of help from the many relevant forums and blogs on the web.

Why not just virtualize the system ?.. elegant and simple but also slower and therefore not ideal for gamers.

[RobertArrington]

Bootcamping is significantly easier if you're okay with slightly longer boot times. Depending on the Mac, EFI Windows creates compatibility issues that do not arise in Bootcamp since it emulates a legacy BIOS.

[redgreenjr]

I gave up on my mac a few years ago, but I did have a lot of fun with a triple boot setup using rEFIt.

rEFIt - An EFI Boot Menu and Toolkit

Its an EFI boot menu and although there are no recent updates, there was nothing to really improve upon from the original. This should give you, or anybody, another viable option to bootcamp, plus the added option of linux boot. Its super easy to install and comes with its own disk utilities to run on its EFI menu.