Mike Mertsock

So Val got a MacBook Pro (15-inch) this weekend. I told her about the Boot Camp tools and drivers for running Windows XP on an Intel Macintosh, and she decided to try it out to save her investment in Windows versions of the Sims 2. The installation process was literally the smoothest and easiest Windows XP install I’ve ever experienced.

Basically, my advice to anyone wanting to do this is to simply follow the directions in the Boot Camp guide (they are well-written) and be patient while drivers are installing. Driver installation (for example, the Eject key driver) is handled by the driver CD that you create with the Boot Camp tools. Windows did a fine job of finding and installing the drivers on the CD automatically; it was more or less a hands-free process. Do be patient during this time: there are many windows that appear and disappear, progress bars that stick just enough to make you worry, etc. But our patience paid off, and everything seems to be running well.

Of course, Windows isn’t in perfect harmony with the hardware. The mappings for keys such as Ctrl and Alt make sense. The Command key (the one with the Apple logo) is understood by Windows as the “Windows logo” key. Of course, this makes sense, but it points out the wierdness of seeing Windows on this machine. There is one last “new hardware found” message that shows up, for some USB device, but we haven’t messed with that yet. You can’t use the built-in iSight camera, and the function key combinations (for example, Fn-F1 to change the screen brightness) that are not working. Power management will not be as good as on the Mac side. Many of these issues are known. I’m not surprised that Boot Camp doesn’t give drivers for iSight. The good news is that wired and wireless networking, Bluetooth, and the other big features are happy.

The Sims 2 ran beautifully on the Windows side and installed well. It likes to run at the native screen resolution of 1440 by 900. This is with the dual–1.83 GHz, 512 MB RAM, and 128 MB graphics setup. I was impressed.

Overall, things went better than I anticipated. No surprises. The scariest part was actually the firmware update, which is done on the Mac side and is required before installing Windows. I guess it was scary mainly because I’ve never seen how the firmware update works on a Mac. But that went well, and the whole process took less than an hour, confirming some reports I read online. Just follow the Boot Camp instructions and of course do some research to make sure it is worth it. For Val, it literally saved money by not having to repurchase Mac versions of the Sims 2 and expansion packs. And the shortcomings of Windows aren’t a big deal to her because it is there for special purposes like the games.

Good luck to anyone else trying this out. I’ll post any interesting discoveries.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 1:01 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.