Anything to watch out for when installing Windows 7 on a Mac?

[TheInternal]

Greetings,

I think I'm going to install a OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB SSD in my old 2007-era MacBook (non-pro). It's a Core 2 Duo. Only has 2 GB of RAM, but I hear it can't get higher than 3 GBs (which sucks). The 2007 models are SATA, yes?

After doing that, I was probably just going to not even bother with purchasing and installing OSX 10.7 (the highest the model can accept, from what I understand) and load up Windows 7.

Can I do the 64 bit version? Can you do a base install of Windows 7 on a Macbook? Are there any big issues to prepare for in advance? Thanks.

I've done a ton of PC installs (around 1,000) over the years, but don't have a lot of experience with lappies... especially not Apple lappies.

 

[ViRGE]

The last time I checked, you can install Windows natively on a Macbook without any real trouble; just pop in the Windows disc like any other laptop.

The issue is that without having Mac OS X installed, you will be unable to generate the driver package necessary to get everything up and running. You would either need to do that first, or have someone else with a Mac get you sorted out.

And while you should be able to do the 64bit version of Win7, I have no idea why you would want to when you only have 2GB of RAM.

 

[TheStu]

Greetings,

I think I'm going to install a OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB SSD in my old 2007-era MacBook (non-pro). It's a Core 2 Duo. Only has 2 GB of RAM, but I hear it can't get higher than 3 GBs (which sucks). The 2007 models are SATA, yes?

After doing that, I was probably just going to not even bother with purchasing and installing OSX 10.7 (the highest the model can accept, from what I understand) and load up Windows 7.

Can I do the 64 bit version? Can you do a base install of Windows 7 on a Macbook? Are there any big issues to prepare for in advance? Thanks.

I've done a ton of PC installs (around 1,000) over the years, but don't have a lot of experience with lappies... especially not Apple lappies.

All the intel Macs are SATA, so you're in the clear there, and as ViRGE said, there is no need for 64bit due to how little RAM the system has, but if that is all that you have access to, then that's fine, it will install and work normally.

 

[joshhedge]

I would recommend installing the latest Windows GPU drivers when you can as usually the bootcamp GPU drivers are outdated.

 

[Nothinman]

And while you should be able to do the 64bit version of Win7, I have no idea why you would want to when you only have 2GB of RAM.

Because the memory access is really just a side-effect of installing the AMD64 build. The additional security is the biggest upside and there's no real downside so installing a 32-bit version of Windows would be the real head scratcher.