![]() Fortunately, there's a neat donationware program, that more experienced Windows users might be familiar with, called Speedswitch XP ( that allows much finer control of your processor power-management features, yielding much more respectable battery times.įor the most part, running Windows XP Pro on my Macbook was just like having a dedicated Windows portable with me. On the plus side, though, Apple do provide a System Tray utility for adjusting the brightness of the display, which helps with battery life, since you can't adjust brightness (or volume, or anything, for that matter) from the usual keyboard controls. For example, with Boot Camp you're left to use the default power management functions in Windows, which, for laptop users, means you generally will enjoy less battery life, as there's no way to access the advanced power-management features of the Core or Core 2 processor. While this allows almost all of your Mac's hardware features to function in Windows, such as the eject key on the keyboard, it definitely isn't as functional as the software typically supplied by other laptop manufacturers, such as Lenovo or Sony. Once Windows is installed, you have to install Apple's suite of drivers from a CD that was created by the Boot Camp Assistant. When I put the laptop back onto a firm surface, everything was fine. In the end I discovered that the problem was occurring because my Macbook Pro was perched on a surface so that the optical drive was hanging out into space (which I wouldn't recommend!), so the disc wasn't being read correctly. I tried many different Windows CDs (thinking that the CDs might be scratched or dirty), but still no joy. One bizarre footnote here: even though I've successfully installed Boot Camp many times on other Macs (iMacs, Mac Pros, and so on), on this occasion the Windows XP installer was repeatedly unable to read files from the Windows CD. Once the Boot Camp Assistant completes its work, you'll be prompted to insert a Windows XP Home or Professional CD, and then your Mac will reboot and begin the Windows installation. Earlier versions of Macdrive didn't support the OS X Boot Camp partition, but the latest version will. In Windows, of course, you can't read or write to a Mac volume without additional software, the most popular being Mediafour's Macdrive ( which costs just $49.95. I opted for NTFS, since I assumed I'd need to read from the Windows partition more than I'd need to write to it when running OS X. ![]() Almost everyone in the Windows world uses NTFS over the older FAT32 system however, while Mac OS X can read NTFS volumes, it can't write to them, whereas it can both read and write to FAT32 volumes. My MacBook Pro has a 100GB internal drive, so I dedicated 20GB to Windows.Īnother choice here is what filing system to use for your Windows partition. If you choose a partition (as I did, so as to keep everything inside my laptop), you can set how much to leave for your Mac files and how much to use for Windows. Boot Camp can be downloaded from and installing it is a simple matter of following a few steps in the Assistant and setting whether you want to install Windows on a dedicated drive or a partition. Installing Apple's own Boot Camp software and getting Windows to run is pretty straightforward, although it's worth remembering that Apple still classify this as a beta, so it may not be perfect (the final version should ship with the next major version of Mac OS X, in 2007). So this month I wanted to share some thoughts about the computing equivalent of being 'an Englishman in New York'. But this time I figured that now the Macbook Pro is perfectly capable of running Windows (in theory, as well as any Windows-only portable), taking one laptop would be much more convenient for travel. On such trips in the past I've always ended up taking two laptops with me: a Powerbook and an IBM Thinkpad - one for Mac OS, one for Windows. ![]() We take another look at running Windows on Intel Macs and consider how Apple's latest acquisition will affect their professional video and audio software.ĭuring the last month I spent nearly three weeks in Europe (I normally live and work in the USA), which meant relying on my Macbook Pro to be my main machine and cater for all my computing needs. A new beta of Parallels Workstation enables you to run your existing Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine, saving you from needing to have two copies of Windows installed on your Mac, and hopefully a few reboots.
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