Windows user getting MBP in 4 days! Advise needed!

Hey guys & gals, finally I gotto become a member of this great forum. I had been visiting this forum for the last 3-4 months and found it very helpful. Cheers to all active members!

Now the exiciting part, I am getting delivery of MBP 15.4" in 4 days as a gift from my boss. I am pretty much a newbie when it comes to Macintosh and its hardware. Now I have some concerns of the followings:

* Upgrading to Leopard - Dealer says it comes with Tiger OS X pre-installed and they will provide upgrade to Leopard. But I heard somewhere that APPLE have started shipping new Macs with pre-instaleld Leopard. So, the question is, should I insist upon MBP with leopard pre-installed or to get what they have in stock? Delivery will be delayed by 3 weeks if I go with the former option (which I don't want to ).

* Installing and running Windows XP Pro natively - How difficult is it to install XP pro via BootCamp? I would be using this installation for 'Development' which means it should be reliable and should not crash. I have a MSDN subscription and the XP Pro is downloaded from it and burnt to a disc. Now, the question is, will this disc work on MBP for installing XP pro? I could boot from this disc in my other laptops, but not sure on MBP!

* Disk Partitions - I intent to have a minimum of 2 NTFS logical drives (say C, D) in XP installation. Now with bootcamp, is it possible to create these drives or is it limited to one (only C)?


I would also appreciate if you can throw any helpful links, resources, tutorials etc. for windows user switching to Mac.

Cheers!

 

Well, apparently all you need is to install apple BootCamp and your good to go

 

*1) If tiger is pre-installed, you'll get the actual Tiger Installation Discs in the package + some kind of Leopard Update thing. I'm not 100% sure if the Leopard update thing is the Full installation, retail disc of Leopard, you might wanna ask. If not, every time you want to reinstall your OS, you'd have to first install Tiger and then upgrade to Leopard, which, to say the least would take a lot of your time.

*2) Installing Windows XP through BootCamp goes smoothly, BUT, you need to have a Home or Professional SP2 version. As far as I've tried with all kinds of versions (had an old SP1 disc) - when I inserted it into the drive, Bootcamp Assistant would not recognize it. Of course, your "developer" or whatever version COULD work, but don't quote me on it.

*3) As far as I know, Bootcamp only allows 1 XP partition (that would be C:\) Again, I've used Bootcamp since 1.3 and actually only updated to 1.4 so I'm not 100% sure on 2.0. And also, If you still want to have some space left for OS X, in a 120gb HDD two XP partitions would be quite the drag, in my personal opinion...

edit: Also check out this sweeeet guide written by our ol' chap, Sam

 

Upgrading to Leopard from Tiger should be painless, especially on a brand new machine.

As for Boot Camp, you disc should work no problem. It will definitely have SP2, and burned discs actually seem to have better luck installing than the holographic Windows discs for some reason. When partitioning, I would use Boot Camp to create a partition the Windows side to the size that you want both partitions to add up to. Then once Windows is installed you can use a non-destructive partitioner to partition the Windows side by itself. Also, Leopard is supposed to have some sort of non-destructive partitioning built in so you may want to try that route. I have not used Leopard yet, so I can't comment on how it works or its reliability.

 

Bootcamp is limited to 1 partition. If you want to make more than 1 partition for XP usage, just use the disk tool that comes with OSX (boot up with Leopard/Tiger installation CD) to create 2 partitions (1 FAT, 1 OSX -> your 1 OSX will be split automatically by Bootcamp, so when all is set and done you have should have 1 NTFS, 1 FAT, 1 OSX).

 

1) I don't think you will need to insist on pre-install. Upgrading from Tiger to Leopard is easy, and also, it doesn't hurt if you get Tiger as well. Suppose you don't like Leopard, you can always revert back to Tiger then .

2) The disc will work fine, as long as it is SP2.

And cashmonee, no Leopard yet? High five!

 

The MBP the guy at work just received a few days ago had Tiger installed. It has the normal two Tiger install discs plus the full Leopard install disc.

If it has Tiger installed, just do a complete clean install with Leopard. Will take a while, but I recommend the fresh install.

 

Thanks for the feedback! I think I should be quite ready to get macified with the new MBP (though I would be using both worlds of windows and macintosh interchangeably)

 

That's indeed very good! Two complete installation discs for Tiger + Leopard! I hope I get the same.

PS. Perhaps, its a dumb question, but do OS X installation requires serial key as in windows? And approximately how much time does it take to install from scratch? Also, is the existing windows partition kept intact after a complete re-installation?

 

Thanks Sam.. Yes, I got SP2 only. And 4708 posts, and going strong! You are the MAN... (or if I missed it, FEMALE ) BTW, your thread on "Mac Switcher's Guide" is very helpful. Gotto know many insights.. Excellent writeup!

 

No, it doesn't require any sort of serial key. When they do this, I think Apple trusts us that we'll only install Mac OS X on one computer unlike Windows. I'm not sure how long it'll take to install OS X, but I'm guessing it's a couple of hours since Apple recommends you grab a cup of coffee or go out for a walk while the OS installs/upgrades.

 

No problem! And yes, I'm a guy . If you ever have any questions, just ask .

By the way, I like your avatar! Spotlight icon...rarely used image, but its a very nice image.

 

Hurray! I got delivery of my MBP today.. and its got the Leopard DVD as well as two other CDs for Tiger.. let the images do the talking!

 

Firs impressions:
* Very thin.. my inspiron 700m looks so thicker. My Inspiron 9300 is monstrous... 2.5 times thicker than MBP
* Got Glossy screen LED. Lovely, vibrant, fantastic depth of color.. in fact no calibration needed. This is totally opposite to the so called DELL TrueLife glossy on 9300. Not so brigh and I had to use Riva Tuner at startup to tweak the colors.
* Runs very silent.. I couldn't even hear the fan.. NO HEAT.. awesome..
* So far, it recognizes every hardware accessories I have .. sleek
* And yes, miss the right-click on the touchpad..

My MBP came pre-installed with Tiger. But it came with a Leopard DVD. So should I upgrade from Tiger or should I make a clean install of Leopard?

 

Thanks for the great pictures, make me nostalgic!

Erase and Install is the way to go. You may even want to reformat the drive with Disk Utility during the installation (you should be able to choose Utilities > Disk Utility from the Menu Bar after you select your Language). Also look for the Customize button and explore these options. You can get rid of Printer drivers, extra Languages, etc. to save disk space.

 

Clean install! Most Windows users would agree with me on this. I've heard that some people had trouble when doing an upgrade.

 

Very nice, iTNerd!

As for the lack of right click, you do know the other ways to right-click, right?

From the Mac Switcher's Guide:

 

thanks for the tip! The languages and printer drivers alone require 4-5 GB space. As I don't foresee using them, I have omitted them. 6.5 Gb for Leopard. not bad!

Also, when it installs, it checks for the validity of the DVD and it seems to take rather longer time. Is it recommended to do so?

I was playing some DVD movies yesterday and one peculiar issue I noticed about the super drive was the graaeeerrrraaaaaaaaaeeerrrrrrrr sound when the DVD was inserted. It lasted for about 4-5 seconds. The same happens when ejecting. Is this a normal behavior?

 

Yes, I already did that. Thanks to you!

 

I get the same noise on my macbook... it is normal. (though mine lasts only a second or two at most)

It does sound like it's chewing up your disks though and gave me a scare when I put my first one in, I thought I'd got a bad mac!

 

Funny comparison (Dell/Apple). It looks like this laptop on the left is 10 years old! Great pics. What do you use MBP for?

 

Indeed very funny. I got this as a early christmas gift. I was offered a choice between DELL XPS M1130 (13") and APPLE Macbook pro. I had used 4 different DELL inspirons in last 3 years (600m, 6000, 9300 and 700m). My 700m recently died ( burnt motherboard ) after 2 yrs of ownership. my 9300 got a yellow vertical line in the middle of the crappy glossy screen and was not usable for 7-8 months. But luckily got a brand new screen replacement for free under DELL international recall program recently.

I will be using this Mac entirely for leisure/pleasure/graphics.. as I have two other DELL laptops for development

 

Now I have installed leopard, updated to the latest update 10.5.1. I am trying to install Windows XP pro SP2 via BootCamp. In the XP setup, it lists a C drive " Partition 3 <BOOTCAMP> [FAT32] 67169 MB free"

Now according to BOOTCAMP document, there is a warning message

"Do not create or delete a partition, or select any partition other than as noted below. Doing so may delete the entire contents of your Mac OS X partition."

I wanted to again partition this BootCamp generated C drive into 2 (C and D) within the XP installation. But from the warning message above, it seems this is not supported and I may possibly land up messing the MacOS portion of the drive too. Could anyone throw some more insights?

I wanted to have 2 logical drives within Windows so that in the other drive (D), I can keep backup and other critical files in case I need to reformat C drive.

Please Help!

 

I was under the impression that people were using a non-destructive Windows partitioner to repartition the Windows side. I could be wrong though.

 

Simply put, it won't work. Boot Camp only supports 2 partitions. You can employ some trickery to get around this shortcoming, but you'll need to erase your entire hard drive and start from scratch. And then later when you want to restore your triple-partitioned (or more) hard drive to a single volume you will need to erase everything again. It's not worth the effort unless you want to triple boot.