Apple Macbook Pro Running Windows XP via Boot Camp Beta

I was caught out totally by the announcement of the Boot Camp utility, despite keeping bang up to date with all the rumours and regularly reading sites such as TUAW and Macrumours. There was no hint of this latest development on any site that I visit and that's most unusual, even given Apple's ability to keep big news out of the media until very close to launch time.

I'd been following the progress of the Unofficial competition to get Windows XP to dual boot Intel Macs but have held off installing it on my machine as I use it daily and don't want to mess it up. Normally I'd be first in the line for voiding my warrantee but it's my work machine not a toy. With the release of Apple's Boot Camp, though, I couldn't resist trying it out.

The First Steps

The first step in getting my system infected, er, I mean installed with XP, as well as OS X, was a trip to Apple's Boot Camp Public Beta web site.

Boot Camp weighs in at 83MB, so it's a fairly quick download if you have broadband. Once I'd downloaded it, I needed to extract the package to my lovely Intel-based MacBook Pro there's no support for G3, G4 or G5 processors in Boot Camp, it's an Intel-only app.

The app installed a couple of items onto my Mac, including a tool called Boot Camp that goes into the Applications folder under Utilities. Before running that tool, though, it's critical that you prepare your Mac.

Backup everything on your system and I do mean everything. There's a risk that things could go wrong and destroy your data.

Update - April 14, 14:00 - Bob Crabtree adds - Just to ram home the point about doing a backup, you might care to read this Apple forum thread. A number of people there are saying that Windows XP is running okay but they've lost access to their OS X partitions - and, in some cases, it looks like they might end up having to zap those partitions and lose their data and program set ups. What's unclear, though, is whether or not the people who had problems properly followed Apple's installation instructions.

I'd also recommend that you run Disk Utility to repair any permission problems and check your disk for errors.

The next two steps are also very important. First, download the Boot Camp Setup Guide and print it off. This is a 390KB/17-page page PDF document and you want to have it to hand as you go through the set up process.

Next, install the latest 10.4.6 update along with the latest firmware update relevant to your Intel-based Mac. All the firmware updates for the three Intel Mac models are available on Apple's download site, so I just had to pick the right one for my MacBook Pro.

The firmware upgrade comes with full instructions and took five minutes to install. All the upgrade does is add in support for Bios but this is the key to getting Windows working on your spangly new Intel-based Mac.

Biting the Bullet

After the backup and preparing my MacBook Pro, it was time to bite the bullet and get installing. I ran the Boot Camp utility and this walks you through the steps needed. It first creates a CD of drivers for Windows. I simply stuck in a blank CD and the disc was created for me.

After that, you get to choose just how much space you want to give to the Windows side of the machine. I chose 20GB, thinking that would give me enough space even to install games. The MacBook Pro has a 100GB internal hard disk so that still left me plenty of room for Mac OS X and its programs. Boot Camp then partitions the Mac's hard disk to create an area for Windows to reside.

Unfortunately, this is where I hit some problems. Boot Camp kept throwing up warnings saying that the hard disc had errors that needed to be fixed. I eventually worked out that Photoshop CS2 was causing the problem - removing the "legal" folder and its contents from the CS2 directory fixed the issue.

Once Boot Camp has created the partition successfully, it reboots the Mac and starts installing Windows XP. Do please note that you need a Service Pack 2 version of the Windows install disc for this to work and that must be (Apple says) an original version not one you've created yourself from a non-SP2 version and an SP2 updater.

Apple also says that using Windows XP Media Center Edition is a no-no but I've been told that it does now work okay with Intel-based Mac. I've not tried it myself, though, so can't guarantee that it will work. However, it is okay to use an SP2 slipstream disc - a CD based on an original SP2 disc but with post-release updaters added. I know, because that's what I used. Check out how to create such as disc on Unattended Windows.

Installing Windows is just the same as doing it on an ordinary, non-Mac PC and typically will take under an hour in total.

Seeing Windows XP running for the first time on my Mac felt very weird (here's an AVI of it booting - size 1.8MB). It also threw up some immediate problems. First, Mac laptops only have one mouse button, so ejecting the Windows XP CD required some thinking about. The quick-and-dirty solution is to open up My Computer, select the disc and, from the File menu, choose Eject.

Next, it was obvious that the display was not running as it should - Windows looked awful. However, as the drivers for the graphics processor hadn't yet been installed, that didn't come as a great surprise.

When I put in the Windows drivers disc I'd created earlier, it auto ran and started the driver installation.

The whole process needs a couple more clicks and then a reboot. After that reboot, Windows was running at the proper resolution and wasn't the blurred mess it appeared as before.

In addition, most of the other Mac built-in components, including Bluetooth and the wireless card, had their drivers installed. A few of the devices don't yet have drivers among them the iSight camera and the backlight for the keyboard.

But, the basics are there and Apple, I imagine, is working away madly on the missing Windows drivers, especially given that Win XP dual-booting is intended to be standard in Leopard the next version of Mac OS X.

After the Windows' drivers are installed, I'd suggest that you next install anti-virus and firewall software Windows running on a Mac is no less vulnerable to attack than it is on an ordinary PC. Then go onto the net using Internet Explorer and, via Tools>Windows Update, install the critical updates for Windows. Be warned, quite a lot of them have come available since SP2 was launched so this can take you a little while to complete.

As I said, I used a streamlined CD with all the updates already on it, so it wasn't necessary for me to go through that process. But even if you are in the same position, it makes sense for you to set up Windows so that it advises you when new updates come available assuming, that is, you want to maintain control and not let the downloads and installations happen automatically.

So far so Good

To date, all the software I've tried runs exactly as it would on a non-Mac PC - I've not noticed any major issues at all. One piece of software I discovered early on was Mouse Tools. This tiny (15KB) download makes the button on a single-button mouse act as a right mouse button if you hold down the Control key.

You could, of course, add a two-button external mouse to get round the problem. And that's something that you definitely should consider if already using an external mouse with your Intel-based desktop Mac, as you'll find that Mac OS X - like XP - has context-sensitive right-mouse-button support, as do quite a number of OS X programs.

Gaming - Counter Strike

My first real test, once I had Windows up and running, was to try out a game - Counter Strike - and see how it played. I have to say I was surprised to find that it ran no less well than on my Windows PC. Click here to watch an AVI video (an 11.3MB download) and here to watch another (9.1MB).

However, the keys are different and a mouse pad is nothing like as easy to use for games as a mouse. Again, though, I had no problem using a Windows keyboard and my mouse (a Logitech) with the MacBook both work as well on the Mac as on my Windows PC.

I'm used to running Counter Strike at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 and realised that the program doesn't support the native 1440x900 widescreen resolution of the PowerMac a problem you'll find when running this venerable game on any modern widescreen laptop. A workaround is possible hooking up an external monitor but that's not going to be a viable solution for all laptop users.

Gaming - CS:Source

At this point, I got a couple of requests from people to try out some benchmarks - Counter Strike: Source and Battlefield 2. Setting up Counter Strike: Source was a breeze and it does support the Macbook Pro's native resolution.

First, I ran the stress-test option to see if this threw up any issues. It ran through fine (check out this AVI video - 5.1MB) and gave a final figure of 83 frames per second more than enough to keep me happy. Then, I ran up CS-Militia but that failed to load. I've been told that's to do with how HDR (high dynamic range) hangs together but haven't yet had time to go back and look into it further.

I loaded CS-Office instead and this worked well - with all the eye-candy you'd expect from Counter Strike: Source. I noticed no problems with the game. The MacBook's cooling fans kicked in automatically as needed and sounded to be running normally.

I had a quick run around the game and remembered that some Dell computers appear on this map. I hatched a cunning plan and if you download this video (6.3MB) you'll see what I did to the unfortunate dell hehe.

Gaming Battlefield 2

As a fan of Battlefield 2, I couldn't wait to install it and was pleased to find that it, too, ran fine. I had to use the shortcut edit hack to get it to work at the LCD's native resolution but that took 10 seconds to do. A quick game showed it worked exactly the same as on my Shuttle-based system.

You can also download a couple of AVI videos of Battlefield 2 being played on the MacBook Pro, one 4.6MB, the other 5.1MB.

Benchmarking

When it came to running 3DMark, I discovered that I had to use at a non-native resolution of 1280x768. Even so, it ran fine.

The MacBook Pro scored 1535 3D marks and the CPU score was 1658. For the record, the spec of my MacBook is 2GHz dual core processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM and a 256MB ATI X1600 graphics processor.

Using Boot Camp Day to Day

Day-to-day working of a dual-booting Intel Mac is very easy. To select the operating system when you boot up, you hold down the Option key. This bring ups two hard discs on the screen and you select Windows or OS X using the mouse or keyboard cursors.

On my MacBook Pro, each operating system takes about 30 seconds to boot up and that's fast for any computer. You can also set the default operating system to be one OS or the other, rather than just defaulting, as you might expect, to Mac OS X.

The only issues I noted in normal Windows use were that neither the iSight camera nor the keyboard backlight worked. That doesn't bother me much but others may use these devices more than I do. But, as I said, I'd imagine that drivers (and software) are being written right now to get them working.

All the other hardware I used work perfectly. In fact, the wireless card actually worked better than in OS X, which is scary and a bit annoying, too.

Back at base, I use the MacBook very close to a wireless router, so get a full strength signal in each operating system. Even so,OS X sometimes still manages to lose the connection when it wakes up and I didn't see that happening under Windows.

I've not had a chance to look into relative battery life yet but would guess that it would be much the same under each OS - but that's speculation, not fact.

Truth is, I don't expect to be using the Windows partition a great deal as I work mainly on OS X and have a Shuttle system for running Windows gaming and serious software. However the ability to run Windows wherever I happen to be is fantastic.

I'm an IT consultant and most of my clients use Windows XP. That means that I need to have a Windows-based system all the time. The Boot Camp program gives me the option to use which ever OS I need and that's great. Kudos, then, to Apple for bringing out this beta for people who need or want to run Windows as well as Mac OS, and also for promising built-in dual-booting support in the next version of Mac OS X.

AVI videos of XP running on MacBook, thanks to Boot Camp Beta

Windows XP booting (1.8MB)
Counter Strike being played - 01 (11.3MB)
Counter Strike being played - 02 (9.1MB)
Counter Strike stress-test running (5.1MB)
Is that a Dell I see before me?(6.3MB)
Battlefield 2 being played - 01 (4.6MB)
Battlefield 2 being played - 02 (5.1MB)