MacBook Pro Dual booting

[Walzber813]

How does the MacBook pro handle dual booting? Who has run Windows on their mac, tried gaming, high end apps etc, and how have they run?

 

[halfadder]

Most of my department now has MacBookPros, most of which have WinXP installed on a second partition for a dual boot setup.

XP runs great! There are two ways to boot into XP, one is to hold down the option (alt) key when the MacBook is first turned on, this brings up a screen with the option to boot into Mac OS X or WinXP. The other way is to use the Startup Disk control panel in either OS X or XP to select which OS to boot by default.

Performance is exactly what you would expect from Intel Core Duo + 667 MHz DDR2 + ATI X1600. When you use the BootCamp utility to add a partition, it burns a drivers CD for you to use in XP. Apple uses a version of ATI's drivers from about the middle of March 2006, so they're fairly recent. Some folks have had success installing newer drivers, some folks have even overclocked the X1600 GPU and GFX RAM via ATITool. Basiclly booting into Windows is just like using any other Wintel notebook.

There are some gotchas. Apple doesn't support WinXP and their current BootCamp utility and drivers are "beta 1" and are lacking some features. There currently are no drivers for the backlit keyboard, automatic screen brightness, built-in webcam, sudden motion gyro sensor, or some of the special keys like volume/brightnes. Screen brightness and volume have to be adjusted with sliders from the WinXP system tray on the task bar. MacBooks only have one mouse button, so you can either download a free utility to let you CTRL-click (like Mac OS X) or you can use an external USB or Bluetooth mouse.

Aside from games, I don't dual boot. Instead I use the totally awesome free beta of Parallels (www.parallels.com). It lets me use almost any x86 OS from right inside Mac OS X. It uses the Intel VT-x extensions so it's just as fast as dual booting. It doesn't have good graphics drivers, though, so it's not for games, but it's damned fast for everything else.

 

[halfadder]

One point about game performance.... out of the box, Apple has underclocked the X1600 by about 100 MHz. This is probably due to the thin size of the MacBookPro and/or some problems they've had due to the manufacturing plant using way too much heat sink grease inbetween the chips and the heatpipe. This can be "reclocked" via ATITool as has been reported in great detail on osx86project.org forums. But basiclly, unless you're playing Oblivion, you don't really need to do any clock adjustments, the CoreDuo and X1600 are fast enough out of the box, even when underclocked.

 

[AmigaMan]

I just want to ditto everything halfadder has said. My experience with the MacBookPro has been the same. I do Java development using OS X (previously used Ubuntu on a Dell) and everything works very well. The only time I boot into Windows is to play Oblivion. Oblivion runs OK but not great but that's mainly because of the graphics card. You really need an x1800 or better to play that game and the x1600 is currently the fastest ATI card you can get in a laptop. And to top it off it's underclocked in the MBP. I've successfully OC'd it to 400/400 and could probably go higher but don't want to risk it.
Parallels worked well when I first installed it, but something happened and now my network connection is broken. I probably need to install the latest beta since I'm 2 revisions back. I also need more than 1GB of RAM, when I start up Netbeans (or Eclipse when I'm feeling frisky) and Weblogic and have several instances of Safari running things slow to a crawl. I also wished I had gotten a faster HD, the 100GB 5400RPM just isn't cutting it. Of course I could be feeling pain because I'm running out of memory and it's paging to disk a lot. Adding more memory will probably clear that up.

 

[halfadder]

Keep in mind that Mac OS X x86 uses about 30% more RAM than Mac OS X PPC.

Java and virtual machines also GOBBLE up RAM like there's no tomorrow.

 

[slugg]

Originally posted by: halfadder
Keep in mind that Mac OS X x86 uses about 30% more RAM than Mac OS X PPC.

hmm why is that anyways? Will that improve in the future?

 

[halfadder]

Originally posted by: slugg

Originally posted by: halfadder
Keep in mind that Mac OS X x86 uses about 30% more RAM than Mac OS X PPC.

hmm why is that anyways? Will that improve in the future?

I'm not sure. My guess is it would have to do with history and optimization. Apple has been making both x86 and PPC versions of Mac OS X ever since the original Rhapsody project started in 1997..... but until just a few months ago, Apple only actually sold the PPC version. They probably put a lot more optimization into the PPC version as it was what customers were actually using.

I'm sure it will improve, or at the very least, not get worse.

 

[bigrash]

I run bootcamp on my mac mini. windows runs flawlessly.

 

[Kougar]

I have not even attempted to google this up yet, but I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere and got curious enough to post here...

When booting XP off the Macbook Pro, what is the difference in battery life expectancy between solely running XP, and running OS X?

 

[halfadder]

Originally posted by: Kougar
I have not even attempted to google this up yet, but I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere and got curious enough to post here...

When booting XP off the Macbook Pro, what is the difference in battery life expectancy between solely running XP, and running OS X?

Fairly close. I can squeeze out about 4 hours when I'm in OS X and about 3.5 hours when I'm in Windows. Of course the only time I boot into Windows is when I'm playing a game or trying something that hits the graphics pretty hard. When I don't need graphics power, I stay in Mac OS X and just run Windows via the Parallels VM as it's CPU power is just as fast.

Intel Macs use standard Intel chipsets, so WinXP isn't really at an unfair advantage or anything.

 

[Kougar]

Intel Macs use standard Intel chipsets, so WinXP isn't really at an unfair advantage or anything.

That is just it. With that entire USB driver issue with Windows XP, I was wondering...

Theoretically, OS X should outlast XP just because it doesn't have the driver bug that prevents Core Duo or a Pentium M from reaching deeper rest states. I was interested in the "worst case scenario", for when battery life would be of extreme importance.

 

[ender11122]

Yea I am wondering about that whole driver buy as well. Did they clear it up or is it still keeping me from getting a core duo?

 

[Kougar]

Nope, Microsoft never released an official patch for the problem, because their unofficial patches don't completely work. The problem affects Pentium M processors too, not just Core Duo's... Probably will also affect the Core Duo 2 too, unless Intel gets tired of waiting and changes the hardware to fix it themselves!