I’ve been looking for a better way to do my Windows dev work at home for a while now. I’ve explored a few different options including VMs and Mono, none of which suited the needs that I have.
I’m not someone who has to have the latest & greatest computers to get my stuff done. The things I use my computer for don’t require a whole lot of horsepower. Truth be told, the newest computer in the whole house is my three-year-old Macbook. So when it came to deciding which of the three machines in my house were going to get the Windows 7 treatment it wasn’t hard to decide.
Apple has said that they won’t be providing official support for Windows 7 on any of their machines for another few weeks, and when they do it’ll be on a limited subset of their Intel-based machines, and only for customers who’ve shelled out the extra $30 for Snow Leopard. Admittedly I’m not an expert in computer hardware, but I’ve been around the block enough times to know that “not officially supported” doesn’t mean “it won’t work”.
The first thing I tried to do was just clear some disk space and run the boot-camp wizard to set up a partition for Windows. Once again I ran into the problem of OS X not being able to reorganize the files on disk to create a contiguous partition. This doesn’t usually pose a problem with computers that have a disk defragmenting tool but of course OS X has some redimentary defrag technology built-in and thus the notion that “Mac’s don’t need to be defragged”. I call shenanigans.
Once I resigned myself to the fact that the only way I was getting back to the nirvana of dual booting was going to be to re-image the Macbook again, I backed up the system, procured a copy of Snow Leopard and got started with the process. Reinstalling OS X was about the same as with Leopard. A couple of new options but nothing earth shattering. The Windows 7 installation on the was also nothing special. Smooth and straightforward as we’d expect out of any modern OS, but it did move fairly quickly.
If you happen to be reading this before you do your installs there’s one useful piece of information in the 14 page document that Apple says you need to read before trying the scary installation of Windows on your Mac. That would be that the drivers for Windows are located on your Snow Leopard install disk. I spent about 3 hours trying to find drivers.
Even though Apple says Windows 7 isn’t supported, the included drivers on the Snow Leopard disk (intended for use with Vista) work just fine. Windows also reports that some drivers fail to install properly, but in my case there’s nothing overtly wrong. Network, audio, video keyboards & mice are all working as expected with the exception of multitouch functionality on the trackpad. Since I’ll be using the Windows side of the machine most often when connected to a full desk setup (KVM) I’m not too worried about it.
For the longest time I simply lived with the fact that my system clock didn’t behave properly in my Windows partition when I had BootCamp setup on the macbook. It didn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to find a way to keep the clock properly synchronized. The problem stems from how Apple decided to implement the system clock which is different from the way that most PC manufacturers do.