Windows 7 on the unibody MacBook Pro via bootcamp redux

If you follow me on twitter you would know I recently upgraded my Windows development environment from the first beta installation of Windows 7 x86 to the latest available build. This time round I’ve gone for the 64bit edition to make use of the 6GB of RAM I have installed in the beast.

I have to admit I’ve never performed an upgraded installation of an operating system before as I much prefer starting from scratch. So as you can imagine I was more than curious to see how this would pan out. Especially since the machine is pretty critical to my work — in the .net world at least. Well I’m pleased to say the whole experience went by completely without incident. The process took around one hour in total which included the OS install and the migration of all my applications, settings and the rest of the gumph.

I tend to spend more time in OSX lately since I’ve been working with Ruby a lot more recently but I will say this: Windows 7 is becoming a pleasure to use with each new build. For beta software it is rock solid and the MacBook Pro is very well supported driver-wise. The fact I rely on it daily for work is testament to that. A good acid test for me is seeing which OS I boot into for my day-to-day web browsing, tweeting and like… It almost pains me to admit that this has been Windows 7 more than OSX lately. However despite the wait, we’ll see if the balance is restored when Snow Leopard arrives.

Windows 7 on the new Aluminium MacBook via Boot Camp

I’ve spent a lazy Sunday afternoon installing the latest Windows 7 beta on my MacBook via BootCamp and everything has gone swimmingly.

To install I had to:

1. Burn the ISO. I chose the 32 bit edition.
2. Run the boot camp assistant on OSX to partition the drive. I created a 45GB partition for my initial experiments.
3. Reboot the machine with the installation DVD in place.

Pretty simple. After the installation had done it’s thing, Windows started up in a pretty skanky looking desktop. This was cured pretty easily by running the boot camp setup from the OSX installation DVD. This installs the necessary drivers for the iSight, system devices, track pad and your other Mac hardware. A quick reboot and I was back in business and sporting transparent windows and a screen resolution greater than a pocket calculator.

I couldn’t get the Apple wireless keyboard and mouse to pair up over bluetooth but I’m certain a fix for this isn’t too far away.

One small hiccup I did solve was with connecting the 24” LED cinema display. After extending my desktop onto the display I noticed the brightness of the external display was very low compared to the MacBook’s display. This was solved by running the boot camp control panel and altering the brightness from there.

Windows 7 absolutely screams on this machine in boot camp as I expected. I’m still installing Vs2008 and the rest of the .net tools so I’ll report back once I get going.