How are Apple's Windows drivers?

I am just wondering, how are Apple's Boot Camp drivers for Windows 7? I am looking into purchasing the new MacBook Pro 13" specifically.

Also, is it true the approximate battery life on these things is 7 hours instead of 10?

 

While Windows does work for all intents and purposes, the drivers are not properly optimized for running on a Mac and there are quirks with the backlit keyboard, trackpad sensitivity, and power management.

If you're going to be spending most of your time in Windows, you should look for a laptop specifically designed for it. If you want/need OSX, get a Mac.

 

i would be surprised if you even get 5hours. Battery life is abysmal in windows. The machine heats up a lot.

 

no idea how it runs in Windows.. you'll get a few hours less for sure. Doing just web browsing, some programming (including graphics hitting the GPU during tests) I pulled about 7.5 hours. If I was doing just non-Flash web browsing... word processing... like Apples tests, I don't think I'd have a problem hitting the 10 hours they claim. I think a good estimate for Windows would be about 5 to 7 hours.

 

A driver is a piece of software that allows your computer to communicate with a piece of hardware.I only have an Apple bluetooth keyboard.Magic Mouse owners lusting for multi-finger gestures on a PC can stop wishing.It is an installation impossible for me therefore since I need to use a keyboard to do all this stuff or could it just be done with a mouse.

 

It always felt to me that in general I was only getting 75% of my computer performance in bootcamp.

 

Bootcamp is the utility used to partition the drive and make it ready for a Windows installation. You don't even run Windows in Bootcamp. Once your drive is partitioned, Bootcamp's job is done.

Having said that, 75% computer performance in Windows is probably a safe estimate.

 

My experience with Windows on a MBP has been awful. Apple's driver support for Windows is very poor - they just don't seem to care how well your Windows runs. If you plan on doing a lot of work in Windows, buy a PC.

 

Anyone tried Parallels?
Rather then Bootcamp I want to run Windows within OS X - I would only want to use Windows for very quick basic stuff and dont fancy having to reboot every time I wanted to access something in Windows!

Can you drag and drop files between Windows and OSX when using Parallels?

 

Lots of people use Parallels for the exact reason you mentioned, and you can turn on folder sharing so you can share info between your Mac and hosted install of Windows.

 

if you just need very simple use... Virtual Box is free... Parallels and VMWare both run a bit better though.

As far as I know, all of them support dragging and dropping to copy files between the OSes... thats the main way I transfer things on VMWare Fusion.

 

Sadly, they work better than the Lenovo Windows 7 drivers I was fussing around with on my T400.

 

also kindof handy... you can mount parallels virtual hdd even without parallels running (read and write access to the vm hdd while in OS X).

something else that sometimes comes up in conversation is a means of backing up your VM files. You can use something like acronis within the VM to do incrementall or sync backups to an external drive via firewire 800 or USB. You can also use parallels snapshots of the VM so if something happens you can rollback to a previous snapshot/state. You can also use Carbon Copy CLoner or something similar to copy parallels virtual hdd file(s) to an external drive. Or you can do a mix or all of these types of backups. Lots of options when it comes to backup up data from a VM.

regarding the original question about Apple bootcamp drivers. I've just installed win7 64 on a 2nd internal drive after partitioning it with bootcamp. I've got the bootcamp 3.1 drivers installed. It works fine. The touchpad is a bit too sensitive and not all gestures are available (can't go forward and backward by doing a three finger swipe left or right while in IE or in a file manager, for example. But you can do the three finger swipe gesture if you are in parallels vm in OS X).

The apple bootcamp 3.1 drivers for the keyboard illumination and the screen brightness keyboard shortcuts are working fine too. They may not be in as small incrememnts/decrements as when in OSX but they do work fine.

I got 4 hrs last night from a fully charged mid 2009 MBP17 while in a bootcamp partition. That was running win7 64 with XP mode on (thats a virtual pc running XP. Similar to Parallels in OS X) , with MS Office 2010 beta, and an Oracle 11g database running along with it's dev tools. I was using alot of CPU and the 8GB memory were nearly maxed out while using Oracle. The network connections were getting a real good workout too. I cant complain about the battery... my Dell laptops are lucky if they get 1.5 hrs max.

One thing I couldn't get working (maybe it's not possible?)... I was trying to mount to the OS X partition to see if I could file share from the windows7 partition. The most I could get it to do was to read only from the OS X partition while in Windows7 bootcamp partition. That was good enough for me but I'd like to have full read/write access to the Paralles vm hdd or at least to some select few OS X dirs.. I don't think that will be possible from within the bootcamp partition but it is a unique situation and I'm fine if I can't get that to work.

hope some of my ramblings helped a little.

Ben

 

In regards to Parallels - do I still need to use Bootcamp to install Windows?
Im sure I saw somewhere that you can install Windows through the Parallels program and it creates an image, either on your HDD or on an external drive?

Or is it better to have Windows via Bootcamp?

 

running Windows in a VM (VMWare, Parallels, or VirtualBox) does not require Bootcamp... wouldn't even make sense to require it. Yes they can support booting up your Botocamped install into a virtual machine, but you can still run a complete virtual machine. Hard drive images for them are simply just files on your computer.. you need no partition or dedicated drive.

Windows installed with Bootcamp and run natively... of course will run better, but you have to boot into it and you completely lose all access to OSX while running it. In a virtual machine, you can do it all at the same time... and the Windows aps can even have just the windows showing up so it looks like the app is running directly on your Mac mixed with your normal Mac apps. Of course there is a performance hit... its a virtual machine.. a total fake computer made in the software (with little direct hardware access) for Windows to run on.

 

I just installed Windows 7 last night on my 13.3 inch macbook pro MC374LL/A.

Notes:
There are no drivers for the 320m GPU. It uses the generic driver supplied by Windows 7, therefore, AERO cannot be used and severely hampers performance.

There are no bluetooth drivers, so that does not work.

There are 2 other items in device manager that are yellow, meaning there are no drivers for those either.

So in total, there are 4 items that there are no drivers for. Bluetooth, 320m GPU, and 2 others. I'll find out what the other 2 are when I get home.

The backlit keyboard ALWAYS remain on and there is no option that I see in the control panel to turn it off.

The battery life BLOWS. Just web surfing, I got around 2 hours? Maybe even less.

Heat is an issue. It heats up MUCH more than running OSX.

Overall performance is not that great for the specs. I also have a Dell XPS m1330 with a T8400, 2GB ram and the Dell feels much faster than the macbook pro on windows 7. The Macbook is also a fresh Windows 7 install compared to a plethora of stuff on the Dell already. It might be due to the 320m drivers and others.

I might try modified drivers for the 320m on laptopvideo2go, but I'm not too comfortable using modified drivers. There are no official drivers from Nvidia for their own 320m GPU.

All in all, if you want to run Windows, get a PC based laptop. If you want to run both, I think the Macbook (OSX and Windows) is still far better than a PC laptop (Windows and Hackintosh). If anyone has any insight on the issues, please share.

 

did you install the Bootcamp driver install? its supposed to have a graphics driver.

 

Yes I have installed the Boot Camp driver from the OSX disc, then upgraded to 3.1. It is just a generic windows 7 graphics driver.

 

well I haven't done it myself (no want to install Windows), but there are posts around places of people having working drivers and overclocking and such... so I know its possible.

 

Also see if you can confirm your running the 32bit or 64 bit drivers depending on which version of the WIN7 OS your running. Otherwise, must be a driver issue with the newer hardware in the MBPs. I can use AERO in my mid 2009 Core 2 Duo MBP17 running win7 Ult 64it... bluetooth works... no invalid devices in device manager... and I can adjust my keyboard's brightness in increments... and I can get about 4+ hrs out of a fully charged battery. Any other refreshed MBP users running into the same problems in win7 bootcamp?

 

It is the 320m drivers. There are no windows drivers for that, unless you get a modified one. The mid 09 MBP don't have the 320m video. I'm running 64bit W7. There are no 320m drivers for 32 bit either.

 

Try the WHQL driver here for GT 320M
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...ebook-drivers-released-ms-update-catalog.html