Windows 7 on Macbook Pro

How is the Windows 7 experience on a MacBook pro? Is there good driver support? I've heard that you can set up the track pad to detect a two fingered tap as a right click? Is this true? What would I be giving up in my windows experience by using a MBP?

 

Yes, I believe that in the newest Boot Camp you can have the trackpad detect right click if tapped with two fingers.

Overall, I would say the chance is high that you'll get disappointed if you want to run Windows on an Apple notebook. Apple update drivers *very* rarely. Battery life is bad, and the notebook is getting warmer than in OS X. Fans may or may not ramp up in Windows. Trackpad is still too sensitive. Backlit keyboard may not be able to be turned off, etc.

Although the MacBook Pro is very fine machine, it gives the best experience together with OS X, which is the way Apple want it.

 

A lot of these issues have been addressed with the latest Boot Camp 3.0 that comes with Snow Leopard. Although Battery life is still much less than OS X, it's not that bad and you get about 2-3 Hours(depending on your MBP version) running the higher performance 9600 GT(depends if it has it). If you have the 13" MBP or the budget 15" without the 9600GT, I would be interested to see the battery comparisons with Windows 7 and OS X.

 

D3X, what is your battery life under w7 using bootcamp 3.0??

 

I wouldn't say they have been addressed. I still cannot turn off backlit keyboard, or turn off the screen brightness. The trackpad is still way to sensitive when scrolling, and unpredictable at times.

My usual pattern of browsing the internet gives me about 4 hours in OS X, it gives me around 2 hours in Windows, if lucky. Always been that way. If I check the power consumption, it is around twice as much as in OS X, which confirms the battery time.

This is with a late 2008 unibody MacBook running 9400M, Snow Leopard, and Windows 7 RC. Drivers come straight from stock Boot Camp 3.0, no updates ones from Windows Update.

Unless there is a difference between Windows 7 RC, and Windows 7 RTM, which magically solves issues, I can only reiterate that running Windows on an Apple notebook gives subpar experience.

 

Thanks for the input. As a developer, I'd like to start looking at OSX and cross platform compatability of software, but I don't want to compromise my windows experience for it.

 

you could use a virtual machine.

 

Use OSX in a Virtual Machine?

 

Well, I'm going to weigh in with D3X on this one....

1. Windows on Macbook seems to want to run the cpu at higher freqs more often, and doesn't manage the speedstep settings very well. However, you can get a fair bit of that battery life back by undervolting the cpu with RMClock, i.e. my W7 runtime increases to easily 3+ hours when I do this - there are tutorials around here on how to do that (and I have to start RMClock every time you boot W7 since I can't figure out how to make the autostart work around the UserControl, but that's ok with me). Still not the runtime Apple gives with OS X, but better.

2. BC 3.0 allows native control of the screen brightness via the keyboard, as long as you use the Apple gpu driver and DON'T follow Windows recommendation to update it to the nVidia one (that breaks it and keeps the brightness at full only).

3. keyboard should stay off in Windows RC if you first disable it in OS X before you reboot into W7.

4. Apple released a separate trackpad update back in the spring which fixed the sensitivity issue. This was, I believe, part of BC 3.0 so you don't have to go back looking for it.

No, Luke's talking about W7 in either Parallels, Fusion or VirtualBox. Depending on the planned use, however, the substantially reduced performance for cpu intensive tasks within any virtual environment might outweigh the benefits of just dual-booting with BootCamp and running W7 natively.

 

Thanks ClearSkies, that's rather dissappointing considering that I thought that the dedicated GPU was the culprit on my machine while running Windows. Like my previous speculation on another thread, this is starting to prove the fact that there could be a voltage setting that is failing to downvolt when on battery mode for the GPU and that the ACPI POwer Management isn't triggering it to a lower consumption. I remember that there were tools/app that shows realtime the battery discharge level(can't remember the name of the app), I'm curious to see what those numbers would be on Windows 7, Vista and XP versus OS X.

 

This is an informative discussion. I wish I had something to contribute. I don't want to buy a MBP to run Windows in a virtual machine, because Windows is my primary environment. I am very interested in these details about Windows on Apple hardware beyond just "it works".

It sounds like I might be better off getting a Windows laptop I like and trying to pick up an older/less powerful Mac for my exploration.

The MBP hardware is just so attractive it is hard not to consider.

 

Well, I wouldn't write it off Apple just yet. I use my Mac for application development as well. Although I'm a graphics designer, I often need it for Microsoft Dev platforms like Visual Studio 2008, Eclipse IDE etc and even still, my MBP works completely fine with it running VMWare Fusion + W7 and it runs really well. However, booting into Windows is an option as well and although it's not quite as nice as OS X, it works well and I don't have many complaints other than to wish for more "polished" drivers.

In most cases, if you don't compare it directly to OS X, W7 doesn't run that bad. Battery life is to be desired, but since coming from a ASUS and Acer notebook user it's still considered as an improvement.

I find myself using OS X more often than Windows nowadays and it's an enjoyable experience, and considering that I had been a 15 year Windows/PC user prior to this, it's quite a understatement.

 

I just wanted to comment on this, i am using v186.42 and also have used v186.03 and the brightness control works for me on both drivers. Other drivers many cause a issue but my favorite so far has been v186.42.

 

You are using v186.42 directly from nVidia? And how are you controlling brightness? Is there a keyboard control or is it through software?

 

I couldn't tell you what version video drivers i'm using but my experience with win7 64 bit has been nothing short of awesome. I can play any games I want and i have had no issues with it whatsoever.

 

Keyboard still have issues with brightness in Windows 7, the lowest setting will still leave it dim even if I turned it off before in OS X

 

I can do it through both. The other thing i noticed about this driver is the powermizer works very well.

The driver is actually through windows update. You can download it here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=410917

There's a healthy discussion about it and there are several MBP users including myself that have used it.