Optimistic question......

JohnSmith17

Can I bring my Macbook pro somewhere where they'll install bootcamp for me ?

( I know it's optimistic but meh! )

ashleey

It's easy. Honestly. Do it yourself. Print off the apple instructions first and do a full time machine backup. You will actually enjoy it!

JohnSmith17

I'm just extremely unconfident, and don't won't to F up my MBP

K.O.Kiki

There is nothing to feck up.

Just have your serial numbers & install discs ready and follow the on-screen prompts.

JohnSmith17

say I did mess it up, what's the worst that could happen to my Macbook? like can it completely ruin it ?

ashleey

Nope. You just put in the apple disc that came with your mbp and restore from your backup. The key is to have the discs and do a backup first whatever you do!

Colonel Panic

Do a backup before you run Bootcamp Utility! Turn on Tme Machine and let it do it's thing! That was I. The very unlikely event of something going wrong, you can boot Lion Recovery and get all your stuff back!

JohnSmith17

going to give it a go tomorrow after college!

ohh and before I do it, the only reason I'm doing it is so that I can play Skyrim on my mac

is there an other way?

Colonel Panic

For a game like Skyrim, running Windows 7 natively as you intend is the only way to go. It'll be fine!

JohnSmith17

thanks for the confidence boost !

ashleey

Don't forget the TM backup and you'll be fine. Just remember to give win7 enough space in bootcamp but not take up too much of your drive

spannerotoole

trying it out using wine1.3. There are several enhancements made to it for gamers. and the boxed edition of skyrim gets a gold rating in the appdb on winehq. Won't hurt to try it. It also means that you don't have to pay the microsoft tax.

spannerotoole

For those of you who think that wine is "TBH that's functionally the same thing as running it in Parallels or any other Windows VM - the big issues are going to be that the game isn't going to interface with your graphics hardware as the developers intended (because you've got the VM managing it and interfacing with OS X rather than a bare-metal install of Windows managing it), and the comparative performance hit of having a VM manager and OS X taking up resources as compared to having Windows managing the hardware directly." Could you please go and actually look at what it is that wine does. Wine Is Not an Emulator, It is a compatibility layer that makes it possible for you to run windows applications on non windows platforms. Hence they run at very close to native speed.

Wine is Not a Virtual Machine either.

Colonel Panic

x86 Virtualization makes what you're saying less relevant. I would rather virtualize a whole machine than try to map Win32 and D3D API calls to their OS X or Linux equivilent. Wine just doesn't seem that relevant and with each version of VMWare Fusion or Parallels this becomes more true.

For modest/casual games, VMWare works great, if you want to play higher end games (albeit poorly since we're talking a laptop GPU here) then booting directly into Win7 is the way to go.

spannerotoole

I see your point about virtualisation, but d3d in a vm is still only in beta, the drivers must be installed with safe mode and a whole heap of problems, booting directly into windows, rebooting a machine just to run a different program? seems a bit backward to me. Are you aware that wine does all of the mapping for you, you make it sound like you have to map it yourself. That is not my experience, I find that on any OS that I run wine on, that the apps needed just tend to work without reboots and drive partitioning and other messy problems.

Colonel Panic

Backward? I wouldn't say that! A bit inconvenient but not exactly the end of the world! Win 7 and OS X both boot in less than a minute, plus if you enable all that resume stuff in OSX, it opens everything just as you left it!

I know how Wine works, I used to be mad into all that geekery when I was in college and it's impressive how far it's come since then, but it still feels like a pain in the backside!

D3D in a VM isn't in beta, it's pretty well supported with Paralleles and VMWare Fusion. I can't speak for the free offerings. Check out reviews on ArsTechnica.com or something and you'll see they're decent enough to work with.

Personally, I've got a Windows desktop for gaming so I haven't taken the Bootcamp route on my Mac, but I do use VMWare Fusion daily and it's all pretty seamless and not really a resource hog if you've got a MBP with enough RAM.

spannerotoole

So, it's a ram hog? Can you limit the ram vmware fusion uses? If not, could there possibly be an exploit there, like the networked drives/virus issue, couldn't this be used to exploit a bug and gain access to the host OS?

Colonel Panic

It's a RAM hog in the sense that you need around 2GB min for Win7 and Lion needs around 4GB to run in a manner I'm happy with. My machine's got 8GB so all is well! RAM is so cheap now that it's not an issue.

Regarding security exploits. I'm sure there's a way if you look hard enough. I've disabled all file sharing between host and virtual machines so for me it's unlikely. At a hardware level, perhaps Intel have done something with security but I have no idea.

My Win7 VM has Chrome, Visual Studio, the Direct X SDK, Mercurial, Microsoft Security Essentials and Office 2010 installed and I don't view external webpages on it so I think I'm safe enough!

spannerotoole

That's insane, on my linux box htop reports 2.5Gb in use and I have lots of programs and two ttys open doing various things. 4GB to run an OS sounds bloated to me.

Colonel Panic

I wouldn't say bloated, it just does a lot of caching to speed up the user experience. Given the cost of RAM (although not from Apple themselves!!), I think it's a wise enough choice and with the exception of the Macbook Air and bottom of the line Mac Mini, all Macs come with 4GB RAM by default.

Fysh

spannerotoole wrote: »

For those of you who think that wine is "TBH that's functionally the same thing as running it in Parallels or any other Windows VM - the big issues are going to be that the game isn't going to interface with your graphics hardware as the developers intended (because you've got the VM managing it and interfacing with OS X rather than a bare-metal install of Windows managing it), and the comparative performance hit of having a VM manager and OS X taking up resources as compared to having Windows managing the hardware directly." Could you please go and actually look at what it is that wine does. Wine Is Not an Emulator, It is a compatibility layer that makes it possible for you to run windows applications on non windows platforms. Hence they run at very close to native speed.

Wine is Not a Virtual Machine either.

There's a reason I deleted that post - I got as far as posting before my pre-caffeine brain caught up with what I'd written and copped to it being gibberish as far as WINE is concerned

Having said that, every time I've tried to get Wine to be any bloody use whatsoever for playing Windows games on Fedora it's been a tedious load of arse and I've given up after several hours. I haven't bothered with it in about a year or so, but even allowing for improvements it's still unlikely that modern system-intensive games would run anywhere near as well under NotWindows + WINE as they will under a bare-metal Windows install.

And that's without taking into account that if the OP's concerned they might not be able to get BootCamp up and running correctly (a very pleasantly straightforward process), asking them to then get Wine to play nice with a modern game that requires DirectX is a bit cruel