Emboldened by my success in getting Windows 7 to run on a Mac Mini using Boot Camp, I decided to press my luck. So Wednesday night, I took my Windows 7 beta disk home and set out to load it onto a virtual machine on my iMac.
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Talking Windows 7
CNET News' Ina Fried discusses Windows 7 with CNET technology analyst Larry Magid
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Having used Parallels successfully in the past to run Vista, I decided to give VMware's Fusion a try--my first experience with the product. Getting up and running was relatively straightforward, a process aided by the fact that VMware lets you enter information such as your password and product key at the outset--handling the rest of the install process by itself.
Although Windows 7 is not officially supported, VMware does have a helpful blog post up on how to install it.
What I found was that Windows 7 loaded on my iMac, even without having a full 1GB of memory to dedicate to the virtual machine. But although I got Windows 7 in body, I felt as if I had lost the spirit of the operating system. The two things I like the most about Windows 7--its zippiness and its graphics--were muted in the virtual experience.
After weeks of enjoying near-instant boot times, it was torture to find myself with the XP experience of having to turn on the machine, then go get a cup of coffee while it finished loading.
In fairness, I might have had a different experience, had I loaded it onto a particularly beefy Mac capable of devoting 1GB or more of memory just to the virtual machine. My iMac has just 1GB of memory total, so I gave half of that over to VMware, a choice that no doubt crimped the speed of both the Mac and the virtual machine.
Even still, I was able to do a lot on my virtual Windows 7 machine. I used it to watch the U-Haul police chase that I had missed. Not only was I able to check in on Facebook, I was able to play the Boggle-like Scramble game to which I am addicted (and the performance was acceptable).
I loaded Firefox on to the machine so that I could use CNET's blogging tool. Despite my fear of writing directly into the tool (not a good idea, even when not running a beta operating system in a virtual machine), it worked just fine.
Overall, I'd say Windows 7 on my iMac falls into the category of "I definitely can, but I'm not sure that I'd really want to." With Windows machines so cheap, I'm not sure that one isn't better off getting a Netbook and having it sit next to their Mac, if they really need to run a Windows app or two.
For more of my thoughts on Windows 7, check out the Editors' Office Hours segment I did earlier this week. I've included the video above.
An inside look at Beyond Binary labs. I've got three demo machines running Windows 7, including the Mac Mini.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)Finding myself with some free time on Tuesday, I decided to try and see whether and how Windows 7 would install using Boot Camp on a Mac.
I must say, I get a little sick pleasure turning a Mac into a Windows machine, knowing that it has to make both Microsoft and Apple's skin crawl to see their progeny used in such a way.
Plus, Macs do tend to make for pretty zippy (if pricey) Windows machines.
With that--and an older demo Mac Mini I hadn't been using much--I was off to the races. I got a fair bit of help from this site. The operating system installed no problem, although I had a bit of trouble getting the sound to work.
But after trying a couple of things, I was able to use the driver on a Leopard DVD (the Boot Camp program itself wouldn't run, but was able to use Windows' File Explorer to get the driver itself from the disk.)
I now have three Windows 7 machines up and running--a Lenovo X300, an older Dell XPS M1210 and, as of Tuesday, the Mac Mini. That's in addition to my corporate sanctioned IBM ThinkPad running Windows XP. Things are getting a bit crowded in my cube, but I did some cleaning and have also expanded into to another nearby desk.
For today, I am using the Mac Mini as my main machine, including for writing this blog. I'm not the benchmarking type, but it feels plenty zippy doing the basics. I also had the machine run its internal rating system known as the "Windows Experience Index," which rates a system based on its internal components. Because of it's slow hard drive, the Mini ranked only a 2.0.
The experience index, introduced with Vista, offers a sort of bare-bones assessment of how fast a computer should be based on its various components. It's not a real-world test, which would vary based on the number of applications one installs, their network connection, and other factors.
Here's Windows 7's take on how ready the Mac Mini is to run the operating system. It got a 2.0 out of 7.9, based largely on its slower hard drive.
(Credit: CNET News)With Vista, Microsoft ranked systems from 1.0 to 5.9. With Windows 7, it upped the highest possible ranking to 7.9 and made some other tweaks to the system.
By way of comparison, the older Dell XPS also scores a 2.0, again based on the hard drive. The Lenovo X300 scored a 3.1, weighed down not by its hard drive (it uses a fast solid-state drive instead) but by its graphics performance.
I plan to keep trying out the different machines, as well as installing different combinations of software to see how things work in various setups.
Now, I like Windows 7. I think it has the potential to be everything Vista should have been.
Vista had a great built-in graphics engine, but didn't really harness that engine to make working simpler. It had better security, but used it more like a weapon to wield over the user, as opposed to making them invisibly safer. That said, I'm not ready to sign on to this petition, which calls for Microsoft to release the product right now. There are still some issues to work out.
I still have not been able to get the newsroom's Sprint wireless card working and the video driver on the X300 crashes when I try and record TV and do other tasks at the same time. On that same system, Word 2007 has started crashing, sending me back to WordPad.
As for using a Mac to run Windows 7, there are some pluses and minuses. First of all, it's not supported--by anyone. Apple approves of Boot Camp for XP and Vista, so if Windows 7 messes up your Mac, I can't imagine you'll find much sympathy in Cupertino (though Apple might use your experience in one of its ads).
More likely, though, you may have trouble finding all of the drivers you need. The Mac Mini is kind of the easiest one, with the least number of drivers required. I've also read about some problems iMac users have had with blue screens of death under Windows 7, allegedly caused by an Nvidia driver issue. In any case, it's been enough to keep me from putting Win 7 on my home iMac.
On the plus side, the Windows 7 beta allows you to try Windows for free (legally) on your Mac. For those who don't want to go the Boot Camp route, either because they are risk averse or because they actually want to use their Mac as a Mac, there are the usual virtualization options--namely VMware and Parallels. I might just try that on the iMac.
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