Boot Camp Tips

Michael Gartenberg | April 11, 2006, 10:05 AM

Over the weekend, I took some time and decided to set up BootCamp on my MacBok Pro and get a sense of what the experience was like. It was a clean system and whole process, including updating both Mac OS and the MacBook firmware took about an hour. Most of that was spent installing Windows. I kept the Windows partition at 30gb (which meant a FAT32 installation as opposed to NTFS) so I could read/write the Windows partition from Tiger. Here's some of what I found. 1. Getting Windows working on a Mac is actually easier than installing on most Windows machines. No OEM install questions, no OEM junkware that needs to be either forcefully removed or a machine flattened. Just good old, Windows XP SP2 running with no fuss and little muss. 2. Some stuff just doesn't work. Apple warns that you won't be able to use your iSight, (even though Windows can see it.) keyboard illumination, two fingered scrolling and shock sensor. In short, you can't use a lot of the hardware features that you wanted because you bought a Macintosh. That's not an Apple issue per se, but it is important to note. In addition, the MacBook delete key is actually what Windows thinks is a backspace key. There is no delete key on a Macbook and that means, there's no way to do alt-control-delete. Right clicking is also a not happening. Fortunately, there's a way around both of those problems. First is to use a free utility called KeyTweak, that allows you to map another key to a true delete key. It's also useful for mapping another key to emulate the right click of the mouse. (or just use the standard Windows shortcuts, shift-F10). The other is to get a copy of MacDrive, this neat little utility allows you to see and use your Mac OS partition under Windows. I've been using it here for my testing and it works flawlessly. There's a few other glitches, for example, screen brightness gets reset after each re-boot and headphone don't silent the internal speaker (sort of defeats why you use headphones). Overall, it's a pretty good release for beta software and allows Mac purchases to get some more flexibility out of their machines. If all you need to do is run Windows, you're probably better off looking elsewhere, but if you like the appeal of Macintosh and Mac OS, then the ability to use Windows from time to time at full performance is likely to make an Apple purchase even more alluring.