Heading off to Boot Camp

When Apple announced Boot Camp—a free public beta utility straight from above allowing users of Intel-based Macs to easily install WindowsXP alongside OS X—people came out in droves to try it out. There were so many different reasons to want to dual boot, ranging from simply wanting to do it for geek points to wanting to play Eve Online to running proprietary Windows software for work while still keeping around the wonderful hardware and software goodness that we’ve grown to love from Apple in the first place. Boot Camp, by its mere existence, instantaneously made a lot of people’s lives a lot easier.

In true Apple fashion, Apple made the process as seamless and simple as possible so that nearly any end-user could be able to do it. Unlike the somewhat contorted process thrown together by some dedicated hackers, there are only a couple of steps, a couple of clicks, and some time required to install Windows.

We downloaded Boot Camp early on and installed Windows XP on a couple of our Intel Macs. What follows is some reflects on Boot Camp, a tale of our experiences using Windows on our Macs, and some tips on how to get the most out of Windows on your Mac. We’ll also talk about how to install Windows Media Center Edition on your Intel-based Mac if you have a burning desire to do so. This, however, is not a "review" of Windows, or even a "review" of Boot Camp. This is taking a look at the ups, downs, and workarounds of running Windows on what used to be Mac-only hardware.

Installation

Partitioning your Mac’s hard drive
Image courtesy of Apple

After updating your Mac to Mac OS X 10.4.6 though Software Update and making sure that you’re running the most current firmware for your Intel Mac, the first part of the process requires the user to partition his or her hard drive so that Windows may be installed. The beautiful thing about this process is that Apple has made it easy for the user to partition the hard drive without having to back up or lose any data (a decidedly limiting factor in partitioning a hard disk from most average users’ perspectives). Not only that, but Apple provides a simplistic, graphical slider for the user to create the partition with. Hallelujah!

The second part of the process involves burning a disc of Apple drivers so that you can install them after you have installed Windows. These drivers are necessary in order for you to use most of the Apple hardware inside of your Mac, such as (on the MacBook Pro) the display, AirPort Extreme card, Bluetooth, and various keyboard functions such as the eject key. Finally, the third part of the process is to simply stick in the WindowsXP SP2 disc and get to installing. After about 45 minutes or so of an average WindowsXP installation, you’re in! Pop in that burned CD of Apple drivers (if you have more than one Intel Mac in the house and end up using Boot Camp on more than one, they can share the same driver CD even if they are different types of Macs), install them, and you’re good to go… mostly.

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File systems

The first stumbling block mentioned by the denizens of Macintoshian Achaia is the file system that the newly-created Windows partition is formatted with. To many of us who have existed in separate Windows and Mac hardware worlds for so long, it seems intuitive to format the Windows partition as NTFS since we would (probably) be using it with WindowsXP, and well, some of us just hate being told that we have to comply to volume size and file number limits.

What is problematic is that Mac OS X cannot write to NTFS partitions—it can see the partition and read the files on it, but cannot copy files to it—and this defeats much of the purpose for some people to be dual-booting in the first place. The solution to this appeared to be to format the drive as FAT32, which is commonly done with removable hard drives that are used to shuttle or store data for both platforms.

"But isn’t FAT32 crappier than NTFS?" Well, yes. However, the ability of Mac OS X to read and write from a FAT32 drive practically makes it the winner (that is, if you want to do such a thing) in the case of Boot Camp for most Mac users.

There are two things to keep in mind if you decide to go the FAT32 route, though. FAT32 has no support for permissions as is the case with modern file systems like NTFS, HFS+, and XFS. All you get are read-only, system, and hidden flags. In addition, FAT32 partitions are a bit more prone to malware.

But what about when you’re under Windows? Regardless of which file system you format your Windows partition in, WindowsXP still can’t read the dandy little HFS+ partition that you have your OS X installation on. This is both good and bad for most people. The good is that there is absolutely no way for those nasty Windows viruses and whatnot that "plague the Windows world" to get anywhere near your Mac partition and, in turn, your precious, precious files. The bad? Well, you’ll never be able to read or save anything to your Mac partition directly from Windows (those of us who instinctively formatted the Windows partition as NTFS are all smacking our foreheads right about now).

So, what is one who really would love to use his or her Mac partition under Windows to do? Luckly, the software company Mediafour has a product available called MacDrive (US$49.95 or 30-day free trial) that allows Windows to use HFS+ hard disks and partitions, in addition to burning Mac-formatted CDs or DVDs, floppies (eew), and partitioning a Mac disk. What’s nice about MacDrive is that you can change the settings so that Windows can only read (not write) from the HFS+ drive if you please, thus still protecting your OS X partition from any malware infestations that may occur. I, however, choose to live life on the wild side and am letting Windows read and write to my OS X partition! Knock on wood…

Usage

So what is using WindowsXP on Mac hardware like? It’s just like anyone who has used WindowsXP before would expect… mostly. According to Apple’s Boot Camp FAQ, the drivers inlcuded on the Macintosh Driver CD that you burned are:

• Intel Chip Set Software (6.2.1)
• ATI Graphics (8.24.0.0)
• Intel Integrated Graphics (6.14.10.4512)
• Marvel Yukon Ethernet (8.49.2.3)
• SigmaTel Audio (1.0.4889.0 nd375 cp1)
• SigmaTel Audio proto_A2 (1.0.4889.0 nd375 cp1)
• Atheros 802.11 wireless (AirPort) (4.2.2.4)
• Broadcom Wireless (4.10.40.0)
• Apple Bluetooth module (1.0.0.1)
• Apple Keyboard Eject Key (1.0.0.1)
• Apple Keyboard Brightness (for computers with built-in displays) (1.0.0.1)
• Startup Disk Control Panel for Windows XP (1.0.0.1)

Additionally, Apple makes it clear that even after the above drivers are installed in WindowsXP, there are some things that will not work under Windows. From the documentation:

The Apple Remote Control (IR), Apple Wireless (Bluetooth) keyboard or mouse, Apple USB Modem, MacBook Pro’s sudden motion sensor, MacBook Pro’s ambient light sensor, and built-in iSight camera will not function correctly when running Windows.

In addition to that, there are a few quirks here and there on various Macintels that the user may find annoying, or at the very least confusing, upon first (or second, or third) use. Almost all of the idiosyncrasies that I personally experienced, however, were specific to the MacBook Pro as Windows functioned exactly as expected on the Mac mini that I installed it on, save the fact that installation on the mini required hooking up a regular monitor to the mini as opposed to producing video output through the DVI to Composite converter that we had hooked up to the TV.

Where’s my right click?

As most Mac users, particularly Mac laptop users, know by now, "right" clicking is recognized in OS X when you hold down the Ctrl button and click on a single-button mouse. Most of us, however, have already adapted our lifestyles (at least on our desktop Macs) for the wonders of the multibutton mouse, which both Mac OS X and Windows often recognize and are able to use immediately. Laptops, though, are usually a different matter for many of us who insist on staying as mobile as possible and often do not use external peripherals on our MacBook Pros, so we’re accustomed to having to control-click when we need contextual menus in OS X.

Unfortunately, due to some oversight on the part of Apple, the drivers included for the Apple keyboard to recognize the eject key and brightness controls under Windows did not take this common usage of the Control button on Macs into consideration. And, sadly enough, most of us have used Windows enough in our lives to know that it’s near impossible to exist in a Windows world without the ability to right click. Apple’s own Boot Camp FAQ simply gives us the brush-off by stating that right-click support is "not available in Windows." Wow, thanks Apple. Now what?

Enter the free (but accepting PayPal donations) Apple Mouse Utility written back in 2002 by a Nostradamus-like seer who could only have seen the future usage of Boot Camp as the reason to create his otherwise completely useless utility that allows the user to (voluntarily?) use a one-button Apple mouse under Windows. Drop that puppy in your startup items and you’ll be good to go on ctrl+clicking on the MacBook Pro from now on. Whew. Crisis averted… for now. Habitual PC laptop-users are still going to be displeased with the lack of an actual second mouse button, of course, but the solution will probably satisfy most Mac users.

Other oddities

For one, I was convinced that the brightness controls on my MacBook Pro’s keyboard still did not work, despite installing the drivers from Apple to do so. Someone in the Mac Achaia politely pointed out, however, that the brightness controls are still workable, they’re just entirely more convoluted. Try ctrl + shift + F1 and ctrl + shift + F2 to turn the screen’s brightness up and down—hey, at least it still works, because I was going blind on maximum brightness there for a while.

Secondly, when waking up the computer from sleep, the computer would not remember the brightness settings that I had set before I put it to sleep in the first place. Whenever I wake up the MacBook Pro from sleep, the brightness is cranked way up on maximum again. Apple will have to correct this problem, as unlinke Mac OS X, things such as LCD brightness settings are not handled by Windows, but by drivers written by manufacturers. As far as I can tell at the moment, there is no real workaround for this annoyance.

Thirdly, I noticed that the headphone jack on the left side of the MacBook Pro was glowing a constant red while booted into Windows. I was informed that this was due to a bug in the driver, and it turns out that (yes, again) Apple’s Boot Camp FAQ does actually address this.

The Digital Audio output can be manually disabled by opening the SigmaTel control panel and deselecting the Enable Digital Output checkbox in the Advanced tab.

Alrighty then.

Finally, when headphones are plugged into said jack, sound still plays out of the built-in speakers. Apple’s comments on the subject are that the current audio driver under WindowsXP does not support rerouting sound, which we can only assume will be fixed in upcoming updates to Boot Camp or the built-in Boot Camp support due in Leopard.

Battery life

Apple’s now-infamous Boot Camp faq has a question asking “Why does the battery charge seems to run down faster when using Windows XP than when using Mac OS X?” with the answer being that the clearly-superior Mac OS X includes power management optimizations that are not available in Windows XP. However, according to my tests, this is not really true. WindowsXP may in fact lack the power management optimiations that OS X has, however my average battery life on the MacBook Pro under WindowsXP was nearly the same as what I can get under OS X based on the exact same “average usage” I used in my MacBook Pro review for battery life (roughly 3 and a quarter hours).

Other operating systems

The next question from most of the geek universe is whether Boot Camp supports the installation of other operating systems besides WindowsXP. The answer to this is “yes, sort of.”

Windows Media Center Edition

This section authored by Kurt Hutchinson

With the advent of Boot Camp and the latest Intel Mac firmware, there are suddenly more OS options for Intel-based Macintosh Hardware. So with that said, we are a big fans of Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition 2005 and we are also fans of the intel mini. When we saw that Media Center wasn’t officially supported on the Macintosh hardware, we were a bit bummed. Strangely enough, the issue is rather simple: Media Center 2005 is on two discs and there isn’t an easy way to manually eject CDs.

Windows Media Center is flexible enough to allow installation from many different forms of optical media. We tried a couple different methods and the best way that We found to do the job was to copy the Windows Media Center discs to one DVD. Our initial attempt at installation involved booting off of the first media center disc and doing the initial setup and then after the first reboot, simply swapping in the DVD and continuing on. While this worked perfectly, we felt it could be improved by making the DVD bootable with the boot image from the first Media Center disc.

Windows Media Center Edition installing on an Intel Mac mini

After installing Windows Media Center, we followed the normal process for installing Windows on a Macintosh and the additional steps required for installing Media Center Edition (e.g., the installation of proper codecs).

Running MCE on a Mac mini

The mini performs adequately enough for a pretty good playback-only media center PC in its stock configuration.

Mac mini playing back HD video. Click for full size

As you can see it’s at an acceptable 58 percent Playback was smooth in both fullscreen mode and in a window.

Mini playing back SD content Click for full size

The mini running Media Center was able to play back DIVX content with ease, while using about 25 percent of the cpu.

Be careful when you uncheck this box. If you set the wrong
resolution for your TV, you could possibly damage your set.

At 1080i on a DLP, the mini was able to sufficiently perform its duty running Windows Media Center. I did have one issue that we have not seen previously on other Media Center PCs. When interfacing the mini which uses the Intel GMA950 chipset for video, we were locked in at 640×480 on the test TV. For some odd reason it did not want to change to a respectable resolution. To solve this issue, we was forced to uncheck "Hide modes that this monitor cannot display" in the advanced Display Settings.

With the proper resolution settings set, we were able to get the mini running Windows Media Center Edition flawlessly on a TV. If you are dead-set on turning your Mac mini into a Windows Media Center Edition box and use it as a DVR, we recommend the Adaptec USB Dual Tuner.

Overall, we were pleased with the functionality of Media Center on the Intel Mini. Keep in mind that this isn’t as flexible solution as a full-blown HTPC running Windows Media Center Edition. It may prove to be good fit for those who want to have a prebuilt, quiet machine.

Linux

Attempts at installation of various flavors of Linux for x86 alongside with OS X have, from what we know, been fruitless. Boot Camp will allow you to get as far as booting off of the installation disc after partitioning (as it does for Windows), but that’s about as far as people seem to be able to go. Both Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu stop functioning once the installation disc tries to read the partitions inside the Mac. Part of the problem may be the lack of Linux drivers for the ATI Radeon X1600 variants used in the MacBook Pro and the iMac.

There have been reports of those having some success with installing Linux through Boot Camp, but they’ve had to destroy what they already had on the disks in order to do so, or reportedly ran into other problems. Alas, Linux geeks may have to either hack their own way into running their favorite flavor on the Mac or wait for Macintel-specific builds are released. Knowing the love of the Linux community for hacking, we’re betting this happens sooner rather than later. Keep an eye out on the Mactel-Linux page for the latest on how to get Linux up and running on your Intel Mac.

Pleasantries under Windows and final thoughts

As much as some of us may hate to admit it, there are a few things that are probably nicer (or at the very least, equally as nice) under WindowsXP than under OS X, at least on the MacBook Pro. For one, the screen flicker that has been plaguing many MacBook Pro users (and most importantly, myself) is completely nonexistent under Windows. Uh-oh, Apple.

Secondly, the infamous “MacBook Pro whine” noise that has everyone up in a tizzy and that Apple is already swiftly (but quietly) fixing is also completely nonexistent under Windows. Double uh-oh, Apple.

If the above problems appear to be OS-related, there seems to be no reason why Apple shouldn’t be able to remedy these issues on their own through software updates or, at the very least, once Leopard is released. Other behaviors that we Mac-users have become accustomed to, such as closing the lid of the MacBook Pro to put it to sleep and having the machine awaken when we open it back up, behave exactly as expected.

Speed

Even though this isn’t a review, we had to see how well the MacBook Pro running Windows performed on a couple of Windows benchmarks. We were fortunate in that we recently reviewed a Windows Core Duo laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad X60. The two machines both have Core Duo T2400 CPU (1.83GHz), but the X60 has integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics as opposed to the ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 of the MacBook Pro. But they’re both running Windows!