Windows 7 on a Macbook Pro
My current drive loadout!
So as we all know I love my Mac stuff, especially my on-the-go powerhouse, the Macbook Pro. As we also know, I was quite impressed with Windows 7 when I got an early preview version of it, and it now resides on my PC as my primary OS for PC gaming (but don’t worry, the iMac does everything else… I haven’t lost my faith or anything!).
iDefrag works surprisingly well
So, what happens if you mix everything together in some sort of confused operating system soup? Well, I already tried this through the new VMWare Fusion 3.0, which runs quite well thanks to Windows 7′s better handling of memory. Vista was terrible in this regard. It can still be sluggish, and obviously cannot run any serious software. It’s really only useful for Windows-only office type products. I mainly use it to learn Dutch through Rosetta Stone, which sadly doesn’t run on Macs, yet.
So I decided to bite the bullet and boot camp Windows 7. My only goal here is to be able to boot up quickly and have some fun in Team Fortress 2 while in the girlfriends’ house or away for any period in a place that gives me an itch for some online warfare!
My experience doing this on my old Macbook Pro with XP was very smooth, but that was not replicated here. Hence the blog post. If I had to struggle through something, you can be damn sure I’ll make sure my readers have to be dragged through it too!
The file list gives an idea of how much crap you have
The issue stems from something indemic with the current Macbook line apparently. The hard drives fill up fast, but not necessarily easily, which means you have to defrag your mac. Not defragging your Mac isn’t an issue as the operating system will not be sluggish as a result of this, but with files all over the place it cannot be partitioned. For those who are clueless, partitioning your drive means creating a whole new section of the drive to make the computer think it has two drives inside. This separation is so that two different operating systems don’t get confused and start crossing wires… or files!
So, using iDefrag for a few hours I cleaned the system up, which still lead to issues but after deleting a few gigs worth of photo’s of music I was ready to go, albeit at a limited 10GB, not the 32GB I wanted to allocate.
Moving on, using Boot Camp 3.0 in Snow Leopard is a dream. The whole process takes about 3 steps before moving on into the Windows 7 interface. Which is where things get creepy. My Macbook Pro is the late-2008 model (the first unibody one) with 2GB of RAM, etc. My PC has top end gear inside it, 4GB RAM, a fancy motherboard, Quad Q6600 chip and a Radeon HD4870 graphics card. Altogether running games flawlessly, but it still stutters on the Windows 7 loading screen for some reason. Fine by me, because once it’s in the desktop it runs fine. But my Mac? It’s like Windows 7 was made to run on a Mac. It’s uber smooth. Install time was far less then an hour and had no hiccups.
Once booted and updated, I installed the Boot Camp options disk from the Snow Leopard DVD, which gives me Mac functionalities within the Windows environment. This includes using the buttons on the keyboard for volume, brightness and the backlit keyboard. It also installs advanced features for the trackpad like two-finger clicking and scrolling.
Boot camp is incredibly easy to use
My first port of call should have been anti-virus, as Windows consistently reminded me. But no, I hopped on over to the Steam website to get Steam, login and download Team Fortress 2. Which I did.
The performance is flawless. As good as my big fancy PC. 40FPS with 4X AA and everything turned up to “high” (textures do have an additional setting which seems to slow things down more then it really needs to). This means the experience isn’t compromising to use, and thus, worthwhile for any Mac owner. Even the smaller 13″ Macbook Pros should be able to handle games like this now, thanks to the dedicated chips inside.
I couldn’t get over how well it ran. It also seems to work well with the often-cumbersome touchpad. Movement isn’t hindered when shooting (which I did by tapping rather then pressing down the button). Previously, on my old Macbook Pro, shooting was difficult because the system confused my fingers moving the crosshairs for actually trying to shoot, which lead to a lot of frustrating moments.
Who would have thought I would enjoy seeing this?
Would I recommend it? Yes. If you need or want Windows 7 it’s worth it, but if all you’re doing is running small apps don’t even bother. Use VMWare to play with normal applications that won’t run under OS X.
It’s scary that I like Windows 7, and even scarier that everything works so well with it. It detected Wifi before ever being in the desktop environment during installation. A very Mac-like move from Microsoft. Sure, they’re ripping Apple off in various parts of the system, but that’s a good thing. It works well and is tried & tested. It also forces Apple to rethink and re-imagine their own feature-set… which is always good!
