If you are a Windows user wanting to use a Mac to run Windows - Don't do it

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Level 2

275 points

If you are a Windows user wanting to use a Mac to run Windows - Don't do it

I'm a Mac user. My wife is a Windows user. I bought my wife a MBP to run Windows, since I'm on the hook for providing hardware and software support in the house.

If you are a Windows user considering buying a Mac to use for running Windows, maybe occasionally booting in to Leopard, don't do it.

The Boot Camp drivers seem to be the source of the problem.

Shortly after installing Windows XP on the laptop, I noticed that the CPU utilization was hovering around 30% and the fan was spinning all the time. The laptop was loud and was HOT. I used SysInternals Process Explorer, and realized that the problem was with the power subsystem. After disabling the device "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" the CPU utilization dropped back down to nothing and the system usability returned. As a result of disabling the battery, the system has no power management and the battery lasts about 45 minutes.

The camera, remote control and special keyboard keys, don't work. They did briefly when I originally installed, but I had to re-install XP, and the drivers refuse to install and configure now. I get errors. I've tried to manually install / update the drivers from the Leopard DVD with no luck.

Firewire does not work correctly. I get numerous errors about delayed writes to my backup drive, E:. This is a bit worrisome. The drive works fine under Leopard and on other systems. The system slows to a crawl after the Delayed Write errors appear.

Basic things like doing a "print screen" of a dialog box, changing the speaker volume, ejecting a CD and changing the LCD backlight are impossible using the keyboard, since the drivers are not loading. Other features like the sudden motion sensor may or may not be working.

I'm a technical guy, and the last 2 months have been a huge headache trying to get the MBP running Windows XP as the primary OS. If I had things to do all over, I would have upgraded her to a regular laptop instead of the Mac. It's just been too painful.

15" MBP 2.33 2GB 2 GB RAM, Windows XP Pro, Leopard with current patches

Posted on Feb 15, 2008 5:29 PM

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Answer 1

Saiing

Level 1

31 points

Feb 15, 2008 5:59 PM in response to troy mckaskle

Speaking as a Mac Pro owner (not Book) who has run Windows since the earliest Boot Camp Beta, I appreciate that others may have had issues, but I've found it to more stable than any PC I've ever owned. I'm not denying for one minute that you've had problems, but I think it helps to balance the debate.

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Answer 2

Feb 17, 2008 2:59 PM in response to Saiing

I am a PC guy (well I got my start on the Mac with a Centris 650, but since 1998 I have been Windows PC only) and have built about 8 Windows PC machines for myself over the years, and I have to say that I am more than pleased with using my MacPro as a Windows PC on bootcamp (with the added benefit of fiddling around with OSX on the side, which I am becoming more and more impressed with all the time). Plenty of people run Windows regularly on their Mac with no problems. So keep trying, I am sure you can get it sorted out.

Overall this is the best computer I have ever owned both as a Windows machine, and as an OSX machine

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Answer 3

Feb 20, 2008 5:53 AM in response to troy mckaskle

Troy our jobs seem alike, I am also the admin at home. The MacBook my wife is using shows no problems so far in Windows XP (though she is using OS X a lot). It almost sounds like you got a lemon. I have heard about the battery thing on some site but I thought it was related to the input remapper or some other tool. Did you perhaps install a 3rd party tool that kicked out the standard Boot Camp drivers?

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Answer 4

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

Feb 23, 2008 7:21 AM in response to troy mckaskle

Don't know what your problem is but it does not represent my experience with BootCamp at all. When I was using BootCamp on my MacBook it was the best Windows notebook I ever used. (Now that the program I needed to run is happy with Fusion I don't use BootCamp on it any longer.) My iMac is certainly as good as - if not better than - my Dell at work. In fact, my Dell at work is just about ready to be re-utilized elsewhere.

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Answer 5

fragmore

Level 3

661 points

Feb 23, 2008 7:51 AM in response to Saiing

Ditto. On a real computer it is great. The Mac OS is perfect, however for the rare time that you want to play Texas holdem, this is an excellent solution. If you want windows and a laptop then don't but a Mac.

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Answer 6

troy mckaskle Author

Level 2

275 points

Feb 24, 2008 11:33 AM in response to Flying Dutchman

The only third-party drivers that I have installed are for the Maxtor Firewire drive that I use for backups. I'm not running input remapper or anything. The core issue is that the drivers don't seem to want to re-install correctly. Apple depends on controlling the sequence of events for installing the drivers. If Windows detects the hardware and installs its own drivers (for example the Human Input Device (HID) drivers for mouse and keyboard) then the Apple drivers don't install correctly. Trying to update the drivers with Apple's drivers does not seem to work. I'm sure that if I reformatted the laptop and started all over, things may work better, but, I've already tried re-installing Windows once and it just made things worse. I'm afraid that any re-format / re-install would only work temporarily.

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Answer 7

Matt95

Level 1

10 points

Feb 24, 2008 7:33 PM in response to troy mckaskle

I've had very good success with boot camp on my macbook so far. I did have an issue where the bootcamp drivers were not loading at startup though. This made for no keyboard support for sound volume, dislplay brightness, and pretty much any and all boot camp drivers. Sometimes it loaded at startup, sometimes it took like 2-3 minutes to load up. For some reason, creating a shortcut on the desktop to the bootcame exe file; it's been perfect since. Make sure its on the program startup list as well(start-run-msconfig-startup).

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Answer 8

Feb 24, 2008 8:46 PM in response to troy mckaskle

Well, perhaps it might be too late but if you want to be in full of control of each of the driver installs then you can. Just explore the disc with the Boot Camp drivers. There is a Drivers sub directory.
You can go "a la carte" with those drivers if you want instead of just running the entire Boot Camp installer.

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Answer 9

troy mckaskle Author

Level 2

275 points

Feb 25, 2008 8:53 AM in response to Flying Dutchman

I'm definitely familiar with what is there, and have tried the individual installations more than a few times. The problem is that the individual driver installs do not complete successfully - the installation results in "Fatal errors". I've tried uninstalling all of the Boot Camp drivers and re-installing them. I've also tried to uninstall and re-install the drivers individually using Device Manager. So far I haven't been able to get things working.

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Answer 10

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

Feb 25, 2008 9:10 AM in response to troy mckaskle

Perhaps a call to an Apple specialist is in order? With so many of us reporting how well this works...including a lab of minis that I set up and an iMac a colleague of mine is using that actually works with three programs that use copy protection dongles, there most be something going on with your computer/installation that is wonky. Which leads me to ask the question: are you using a shrink wrapped version of Windows or an OEM?

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Answer 11

Unseelie

Level 1

10 points

Feb 25, 2008 11:26 AM in response to troy mckaskle

Is your copy of XP a store bought RETAIL copy, or is it OEM (or perhaps a corporate site license copy)? Also, is it XP SP2?

I've seen similar issues when using an OEM copy that came with another PC... the ultimate issue being that there were other drivers being installed for hardware on the original PC. I finally ended up getting a retail copy of XP Pro SP2 and all of my problems went away.

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Answer 12

pr100

Level 2

478 points

Feb 25, 2008 5:53 PM in response to troy mckaskle

As a diehard Mac user for over 15 years, I am inclined to agree with you. I was so impressed with the feature set of Leopard and the new Intel Macs that I bought the Full Monty as a Christmas present to myself -- and I have spent/wasted most of the 8 weeks since on troubleshooting, mostly of Boot Camp. I must have reinstalled XPsp2 at least 6 times (at over 4 hours a time) and the drivers do not install properly. For whatever reason, Sigmatel or Realtek drivers don't install for me and I get no audio unless I dive into the weird wild web game of hunt the Windows thimble. Last time I installed, no PCI and no inclination by the Os to automatically fix it. Apple don't want to know about Windows queries - even though it's at least their shared responsibility that the drivers don't install. And Microsoft aren't too keen to help me with a product I bought many years ago.

The last time I had a usable installation of Windows, I started playing poker with Pokerstars' downloaded software and within 5 minutes my computer shut down on me and rebooted into MacOs. Disk Utility told me that my Pokerstars had too many clusters and it couldn't be fixed. So that was erase and reinstall #6.

But thereafter, I couldn't boot into my Mac partition, even though it was passed healthy by Disk Utility. TechTool however detected some B-Tree problems and they persisted even after a zero-erase of the Boot Camp partition - and I still couldn't boot into Leopard: the Finder would quit on startup, it couldn't be relaunched and nothing worked. Eventually I discovered that I could fix my Mac partition problems by deleting my Boot Camp partition entirely. My partition map had become corrupted and that, I am convinced, is a result of a bug in Os 10.5.2, rather than Windows.

This stuff is basically unsound and unsafe in my view and since I earn my meagre crust on this machine, Boot Camp (and any other kind of internal partition) has been banished forever.

Simon

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Answer 13

troy mckaskle Author

Level 2

275 points

Feb 26, 2008 8:25 PM in response to dwb

You're probably right. I did buy AppleCare on the laptop so it should be no issue. I just have a sneaky suspicion that I'll be unable to get support for Windows, or I will be instructed to re-format / re-install, which I don't want to do again. I am using a shrinkwrapped version of XP Pro with SP2. I picked it up in the Microsoft Store while there for a briefing. Ten Bucks!

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Answer 14

troy mckaskle Author

Level 2

275 points

Feb 26, 2008 8:26 PM in response to Unseelie

Answered above, too. I'm using a shrinkwrapped copy, not an OEM copy.

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Answer 15

dwb

Level 7

32,920 points

Feb 27, 2008 3:59 AM in response to troy mckaskle

Troy, you could be right but assuming you can get to an Apple store or independent reseller, you may find yourself pleasantly surprised. My local Apple store has a true genius Genius (he's my best friend, a former student, and I'm proud to say that I taught him at least 5% of what he knows 🙂 ). Your problem might ring a bell with him/her and if not get a fix, at least get help to avoid the problem when you do it again.

Speaking of doing it over 😟 - Make sure your Win partition is NTFS and get a copy of WinClone. Its a Mac program that will copy your BootCamp partition to a Mac disk image and then, if needed, restore it. Once you've done the reinstall and used the Leopard CD to install Apple's drivers, before doing anything else, boot back into the Mac-side and perform the clone. That way if/when your Windows installation goes south, you can restore the system quickly without going through the most annoying OS installation in the world. (I hate installing Windows!)

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