Decided to try Windows 7 tonight on an extra hard drive in my Mac Pro. I’ve heard good things about it, and had the urge to play some Windows-only games so I figured I may as well update to the latest OS while I was at it.
It has been quite an adventure, with a lot of Googling and WTF moments. Surprisingly most of these problems weren’t really Microsoft’s fault, but Apple’s. Apple will be releasing a Windows 7 compatible version of Boot Camp shortly though, which should make this a much smoother process, so it’s not really their fault, as they don’t recommend installing 7 at this point anyway.
The first .iso I burned would not work. After booting up from the Windows 7 install DVD I was presented with an MS-DOS style error message that looked like so:
1. 2. Select CD-ROM Boot Type_
Of course pressing 1 or 2 did nothing, and nothing else on the keyboard provoked a response either. Rolling my eyes, I rebooted into OS X and started Googling the error message in the hopes of figuring out what was wrong.
I ended up using the fix from a comment at this site.
This fix involves downloading this application and then running the following from a command prompt on a Windows machine:
oscdimg.exe -n -m -bd:\boot\etfsboot.com d:\ c:\windows7x64.iso
This somehow did something to the image file that would be burned to disc so that it would work with the Apple EFI correctly and load.
Of course in order to run this application I needed a Windows machine, and my Windows HD had already been wiped when I used Boot Camp to prepare it for installing the Windows 7 that I thought would work. Luckily I had a copy of Parallels and a Windows XP image installed on OS X so I used that to create the new DVD.
After applying that fix everything installed easily and quickly and was actually very smooth for a Windows install. When it booted up it detected my video card and I was running at full resolution right away. It downloaded the updated version of the driver as well so I would have all the features available on the card.
I tried put in my Snow Leopard disc in order to install the Boot Camp drivers and get all my hardware working, but again got a cryptic error message that said “Boot Camp x64 is not supported on this computer model”.
Again heading to Google I find out that this is another problem with Boot Camp for some Mac models, but again it had a relatively easy fix.
This time I started up a command prompt with administrator rights by holding CTRL + Shift while I started it, and entered the following command as detailed here:
D: cd “Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple” msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi
This somehow bypassed the part of the Boot Camp installer that was causing the error, and went ahead and installed all the drivers anyway.
Now my hardware is working, including all the keyboard buttons and sound, etc. Hooray.
The next thing I did is use Ninite to install all of my commonly used software at once without running through all of the installation wizards, declining browser toolbars, etc. Honestly I was extremely impressed with this service and found it incredibly useful. The software available on this site with the click of a button is almost all of the software I use on a Windows machine. Chrome, Skype, Pidgin, iTunes, VLC, Foxit Reader, anti-virus, Flash, uTorrent, Dropbox, Steam, ImgBurn, Launchy, RealVNC, 7-Zip, all installed at once within a couple of minutes. Really great service, wish something like that existed for the Mac.
So, I’ve been using Windows 7 for an hour or two so far and it has been pretty good. No crashes or anything of course, and I dig some of the Aero features. The new start menu is actually pretty slick, I especially like the jump-up menus or whatever they call them. Basically you left click on an app in the menu and then drag upwards and it pops up a little menu that gives you shortcuts for that application. For instance in Chrome it shows you your most visited sites, most recently closed tabs, application windows, etc all within a couple of clicks. Pretty handy.
I’m still obviously going to use OS X most of the time, but it looks like this really is the best Windows version yet, as a lot of the reviews say. We’ll see if it holds up over time, but the initial impression is a lot better than any other Windows OS I’ve used.
