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@ 2009/03/10Now that we all have our beta copies of Windows 7 to play with, Ars thought it was time to take Vista's successor for a spin on the Apple side of the street. After all, it isn't every day that recent switchers and established users get to (legitimately) try out a copy of Windows for free, so we burned a couple of ISOs and got to work.
We covered all the major bases for our experiment, and just to keep things interesting, we worked on a unibody MacBook with those multi-touch trackpads that don't even play well with Vista yet. We installed both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 natively in Boot Camp, then moved on to virtualization with VMware Fusion 2 and Parallels Desktop 4 just for good measure.
Overall, things went well, but since this is a beta OS that is supported by exactly zero parties involved, there were naturally some drawbacks and a few dead-ends. We'll run through installation procedures and best practices, and share some general tips on what to look out for. Ultimately, we found that Windows 7 is definitely doable—even usable—on a Mac under the right circumstances, but "beta" definitely means beta for now.
We covered all the major bases for our experiment, and just to keep things interesting, we worked on a unibody MacBook with those multi-touch trackpads that don't even play well with Vista yet. We installed both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 natively in Boot Camp, then moved on to virtualization with VMware Fusion 2 and Parallels Desktop 4 just for good measure.
Overall, things went well, but since this is a beta OS that is supported by exactly zero parties involved, there were naturally some drawbacks and a few dead-ends. We'll run through installation procedures and best practices, and share some general tips on what to look out for. Ultimately, we found that Windows 7 is definitely doable—even usable—on a Mac under the right circumstances, but "beta" definitely means beta for now.
