The Black Macbook and Boot Camp
06.08.06 - 08:12pm
I did it. I caved. I bought a Macbook. Yes, you heard me correctly, the Mac zealot hating PC overclocking nut has finally caved in to Apple and their Macbook. I started off the day by buying a set of Oakley�s and figured while I am at it, I might as well buy a Macbook. Since the Apple store at Lennox was only a block away from Phipps Plaza, my mother and I jumped in the car and headed on over. For the entire 5 minutes in the car and 10 minutes of walking I was like a little kid on crack.
When we walked into the store I already knew what I wanted but I quickly stepped to the side and looked up the rebate form for the stunt I was about to pull. Apple recently put out their Back to School Promotion on their entire line of computers. When you buy a Mac and buy an iPod on the same visit, you receive a $179 mail-in rebate. Having confirmed this was still true, I quickly snagged one of the wandering Apple guys and blurted out “Black Macbook now!” and he went running to the storeroom and returned with a Macbook in hand. Once at the checkout line I informed him that I wanted a Black 2GB iPod Nano and then he asked which school I go to for the student discount I had mentioned. Now at the time I was wearing a blue Georgia Tech t-shirt. Take a guess buddy. Anyways once I was out the door I had already started making plans on how to torment this new piece of technology.
Boot Camp
The first logical step was to go to Boot Camp. If you don’t know what the Boot Camp I am talking about is, it would be the program from Apple that lets a person install XP Professional SP2 on any of the new Intel Macs. Since XP Pro has been the basis of my computing career for the last 5 years or so it seemed logical to put XP on this machine. But then my mind started to think of other things to do. Immediately I thought about Vista. What if? Is it possible? I decided to find out immediately. After a little Google search it became apparent that installing Vista on a Macbook could pose to be troublesome so perhaps I should start with installing XP.
For XP to work on a Mac, you need very specific drivers that work just for Mac hardware. This is where Bootcamp steps in by providing you with the specific drivers that will enable your computer to run with full functionality. To start Boot Camp will generate a partition for XP to install upon. Once this partition has been created, Boot Camp will require a blank CD-R so that it can write a few files for the XP installation. These files are all the drivers that will let the Mac hardware work in XP. Once this Driver CD is complete, you insert your XP Professional SP2 disk and restart the Mac. Upon restart the Windows Setup screen will pop up and you will basically start a standard XP installation.
Once you finally get into XP and can do stuff, go to My computer and eject the XP SP2 CD and slide the Drivers disk I mentioned above into the computer. Now XP will begin installing all the drivers to get your computer working. Once this finishes up then you are good to go. I immediately ran the Disk Defragmenter utility in Windows and once that was complete my computer was up and running with XP and OS X.
What is next?
Well I got XP up and running in about an hour or so, I think it is time to make a few plans and try to force Vista down the Macbook�s throat. Tomorrow I will start the process of getting this working with Vista but for the night I am going to enjoy OS X and play around with it. Time to go play with my new baby.
Nice shades.
I love the cover for the shades :D
After you play around with OS X for a few days you will stop caring about Vista.
Oh man, I freaking love this laptop. I was watching movies last night in bed, this morning I was talking on Google talk with Meagan, and now I am blogging on it. All in Windows XP because I live by Microsoft. I can’t wait to toss Vista on this machine. I jus need to upgrade to 2 gigs of ram, that is what holds me back.
For the life of me I have no idea why someone would want to use XP on a MacBook. It jsut don’t understand it!!
I feel I just have to point this out but according to the Flickr Terms of Service if you post a Flickr photo on an external website, the photo must link back to its photo page.
ditto to what Tom said… the apple osx is just the most fantastic opperating system i have ever had the pleasure to work with - i dont own a mac… well unless you count the 15 year old one I keep in the spare room. I have however used pcs for a long, long time and used 4 different versions of linux, windows xp is by far the best version of xp out yet, however I feel that a linux distro such as ubantu comes seccond best to the mac os, its basically linux with a very pretty and easy to use desktop :)
Im not too sure if i like the look of the black macbooks, the white ones are still the best in my eyes :p
Sam Kellett, Flickr issue has been fixed, thanks for notifying me. Perhaps I should read the fine print or host my own files.
Phil, I love using XP on the Macbook, with OS X I feel very sheltered. For example with the file system, there isn’t any easy way to quickly manipulate files like in Windows. With the Windows File System if I wantd to I could delete the entire C:\windows directory if i wanted, with OS X I wouldn’t know where to start. Lots of little things bother me about OS X also, like the fact that it is currently eating up over 10 gigs of my hdd. I think I need to format the disk and perform my own installation of OS X once I am comfortable with OS X.
Awesome shades!
I am thinking of instaling Vista on my new macbook pro too! Looking forward to the review of your experiance.
you’ve stolen my specs, I wondered where I had left them. Send my glasses back imediately.
The reason some would want to run XP on a Macbook or Macbook Pro is because the design of these machines is amazing. Hard to find a non-Apple with the physical properties these things have.
I’ve tried BootCamp and have fallen back to using Parallels. In BootCamp, you don’t have an easy right click (you can use two-finger-tap in OS X/Parallels), no iSight (although Skype/OSX doesn’t support video anyway, and neither does it work in Parallels), and other annoying features until you remap keys. Other than speed (and it’s turning out to be a surprisingly minor difference), I just couldnt’ see any reason why not to stay in OS X and virtualize XP.
I suspect you’ll find that w/ 2GB mem you’ll be much more amenable to Parallels.
This is coming from someone who never really used OS X before this Macbook Pro, so I’m definitely not an Apple fanboy :) There are definitely annoyances, like the wacky keyboard shortcuts, but you actually learn to appreciate them. Cmd-Q works in EVERY app, and Cmd-, gets to Preferences in EVERY app. God bless whoever wrote the style guide and makes these things work!
As for the file system, it does feel weird to be “insulated” from it. And there are definitely times where I want to find something and have to go searching for it because it’s hidden from my user account. However, if you want the “full” XP filesystem experience, you can turn on the “view all files” or whatnot through a preflist and you get the *NIX filesystem in al its glory :)
Chris, you do NOT need XP on a mac. Macs are fabulous on OS X. Other than that, how do you like your Mac? How is Meagan? I haven’t heard from her sice she left. Hope all is well! Ttyl!
The only reason I’d want to put XP on one (and I think they are amazing machines for the price) is to play the thousands of dollars worth of video games I’ve collected over more than 2 decades of using a Windows-based PC as for minor things that. Of course, it doesn’t hurt when most of my peers and work use Windows-based systems. So in those 2 respects, for me, it’s just easier to have it around even though I love Mac OS when I did have the pleasure of using it in University.
Thanks for all the comments guys, been rather busy so I haven’t had a chance to reply.
As Peter Filias mentioned, the physical specifications of the MacBook are impeccable. These machines are solid, I know in 5 years I won’t have anything wiggling loose. Then you can’t go wrong with what is essentially the Centrino platform from Intel. In regards to running XP on the machine, I find it very useful due to the fact that a large portion of my programs are either Windows only or too expensive to re-buy on a Mac. A perfect example would be the Office 2007 suite, it simply isn’t out for Mac yet and I’m not going to use 2004 when I have 2007. All in all this is a very solid machine that fits my mobile requirements perfectly, I achieved nearly 6 hours of usage the other day on one charge, that is phenomenal. Thanks for reading everyone!
To each his own, but it seems Apple is making a wise decision in abandoning Boot Camp in favour of Parallels… it means users will always have to boot in OS X to run Windows XP, meaning they can’t just ignore OS X and only boot XP. :)
That’s inaccurate Daniel. Boot Camp is coming STANDARD in the next OSX version - “Leopard”. It will be built right in - so your going to have it - like it or not. :D ;)
Well I have an imac G3 (the blue see through bubbles) and it has mac OS X. I love it but as my school(Im 13) needs to use things like Publisher and I\’m doing an I.T. course so it will be kinda useful to have XP so I\’m going to get a black Apple Macbook and put boot camp on it. But as soon as I have finished school for he day Mac will be starting again!!
Do they have any packaging in the box?
Well, stuck with a 1G white MacBook here. Anyway, I find that the MacBook is a decent gaming platform-you just have to max out the ram and use clockgen/something similar to up the GMA 950’s VRAM allocation in Windows XP. I’m finding that Half-Life 2 runs at 15-25 fps with the latest drivers via Boot Camp at 640*480 (which is respectable, in my opinion, really)… anybody else as lucky as me?
I found the GMA950 to be a rather decent gaming GPU so long as you realized it has limitations. It’ll be easily crushed by the cheapest low-end discrete GPU but if you just HAVE to run a videogame you can easily tweak the texture settings so run at the native 1280×800 with not too shabby performance.
I do realize that the question is to go discrete or not discrete-but hey, if AnandTech can get an overclocked Core 2 Duo to run Unreal Tournament ‘04 at 30 frames/second, it’s also a matter of the CPU itself… the limit IS the sky, but it does come at a cost. IMO, I might as well stick with the built-in GPUs (the X1300 is also quite OK…) for the price.
But then again, it really is all a matter of personal taste, isn’t it?
I had a Mac desktop years ago. I switched to a Windows laptop around college, mainly because I wanted something different. But when OS X kept improving, I got a MacBook (leopard) a few weeks ago and am in love. Sure, there’s a few trade-offs and if I really need to use some programs I can do the boot camp or parallels thing. But i’m very happy - I look at my Windows computer and I know its strengths but the MacBook really excites me.