Noob questions updates, running Windows, and etc.

I am new to Mac and OS X been IBM and Windows for 10 years. I am catching on something but questions on others. Here are a few I hope someone can help with.

How do you update drivers? Does this happen automatically with software update?

How do you update the EFI boot system?

I want to run some programs that are only compatible with Windows. Is it better to run virtual machine or dual boot?

If I do a clean dual boot install where do I obtain the drivers?

 

Like Microsoft's Windows Update, Apple has their own software updater which will download the latest Mac drivers when they become available.

Apple's software updater also does these too. No worries there.

That depends on the application. If it's Windows games, then a dual-boot option is recommended. If you just want to run the Windows version of Microsoft Office, then setting up a virtual machine would work.

The Windows drivers for a clean dual boot install are on the Snow Leopard install DVD. See Apple's support page for more details.

 

Thank you so much for the answers! The boot camp manager software, does this contain drivers as well. I am going and downloading it now and it ask me to save to disc or external drive FAT formatted but I keep getting an error.

 

The Boot Camp Assistant should already be on your Mac. Use that to setup your machine to install Windows, then after Windows finishes installing you just need to put in the Snow Leopard DVD to install the drivers. No extra download is needed really, since Apples software updater will also be installed when you install the drivers on the Windows side.

 

Thank you for all the help. I have one last question. I have installed Windows 7 Professional on my MacBook Pro do I need antivirus software for the windows portion of this disc?

 

Absolutely! Win7 is just as vunerable to viruses, etc. running on Mac software as any other.

 

installing Windows using Bootcamp, then booting into Windows, is running WIndows exactly the same as any other PC... for all practical purposes, when you boot Windows, it *is* a PC, so all PC rules apply.

 

Thank you all!

Does Mac have anything like disc defragmenter or disc cleanup that is needed to be run?

 

Nope OSX handles disk defragmenting auto-magically. Or at least I've never felt like the drive needed to be manually defragmented. On the clean up part, I'm not sure. Never needed to cleanup after the OS, but did need to clean up my own junk from time to time.

 

Should you use security / anti-virus suites on mac's?

 

The general consensus is that you don't need an Anti-Virus app on the Mac OS X side. I recommend at least turning on the firewall that OS X has.

 

alright. I see under utilities there is a raid utility does the mid 2010 i5 MBP support two hdd?

 

while raid needs more than 1 hard drive... having multiple hard drives does not require raid...

you can run a second hard drive in a MBP if you get an install kit (3rd party) to replace your optical drive with a hard drive.

 

I understand that about Raid, I was just thinking from a performance point running Raid configuration. That stinks about having to remove the optical drive to do it. Ill just keep it like it is then.

 

You will get better performance from a good SSD over a raid 0 set up in there... especially since there is no hardware raid controller in the machine, meaning its all software raid.