As I mentioned previously, installing Leopard on my MacBook Pro gave me the opportunity to reinstall Windows XP and the new Boot Camp 2.0 drivers. This time (and again, for the benefit of my future self) I’ve compiled the list of what gets installed on a fresh machine: Continue reading ‘Reinstalling XP on the MacBook Pro’
Archive for the 'Apple' Category
This interesting rainbow effect is what greeted me when I booted my newly Leopardised MacBook Pro this morning. At first I thought it must be a driver issue, but with further investigation the video proved to be in “rainbow mode” when booting from the HDD, Windows and the Tiger DVD. It was even glitching on the Apple logo and swirling loading circle.
Thankfully a call to AppleCare soon had it sorted, by resetting the PROM in the device. Here’s how:
- Shut the machine down.
- Turn it on, and immediately hold down Alt + Apple + P + R.
- Wait for the boot chime, the MBP will reset.
- Wait for the second chime, then let go and let it boot.
At which point it all looked normal again. A very weird occurance though; I wondered if it were related to the heat the GPU gets to, Mr AppleCare said to keep an eye on it as if it happens again it would need to be looked at by Apple.
I was on hold for 15 minutes to get to talk to someone, he resolved the issue in a fraction of that time.
My first generation MacBook Pro steadfastly refuses to read the dual-layer DVD that Leopard comes on. All my Windows machines can read it (or at least the BootCamp partition) and my G5 can read the disk too, but the MacBook Pro won’t boot off it. However, I do have plenty of external drives kicking about so thought I ought to be able to boot off one of those. And yes, I’m only really doing this to get continued Boot Camp support for the Windows XP install I use more than anything else on the MBP. Here’s what I did:
- Use Disk Utility (on the G5) to create a DMG file.
- Connect the MacBook Pro and G5 to my gigabit network, and boot the MacBook Pro into Tiger.
- Connect the USB drive (a self powered 100Gb 2.5″ drive in this case) to the MacBook Pro (I used the right USB port - not sure if it matters which).
- I erased the (NTFS) partition on the external disk, and created a GUID Apple partition.
- Select the Restore tab on Disk Utility and drag the DMG file to the source field.
- Drag the USB partition (the one I just created) to the destination field.
- Click Restore.
- After it’s finished, you should be able to open System Preferences and find the USB disk in the Startup Disk pane.
- Select it and press restart - the MacBook Pro reboots and boots off the external disk.
- From here on it’s as if you were using the DVD!
The install was pretty swift - without the extra printer drivers, fonts or X11 it took about 10 minutes to install. Since installing Leopard has killed rEFIt the next step is to reinstall Windows and add the Boot Camp 2.0 drivers.
Oh, and the Leopard intro movie is quite pretty, but has really silly music.
Apple updated BootCamp today and introduced support for Windows Vista, so it looks like I can spend some time over the weekend doing a fresh install of Vista with supported drivers this time. Of course it also means I get to have some fun removing the Microsoft Bluetooth stack and replacing it with a fully functional Widcom one, but them’s the breaks. The new BootCamp introduces lots of updated drivers (including the camera on Vista) and hopefully does something about the power saving and suspend/hibernate issues. Although they may be more to do with Vista itself rather than the MacBook Pro hardware. We shall see…
You know how after using a Windows PC for a few months it stops being quite so responsive to your clicks? You start seeing the hour-glass more often, it takes longer to boot and log-in, and starting applications that previously opened almost instantly now gives you time to go and make a cup of tea? We call it “Windows-cruft” and it’s universally understood by the Windows community.
I didn’t think that Macs, especially OS X, suffered, but suffer they do. “OS X Cruft” is just as bad as Windows-cruft, and the delays and glitches are just as infuriating. For the third time in as many days I’ve had to hold down the power button on my G5 to switch it off while the spinning beachball of death obstinately refusued to go away. My crime - opening Safari. Or closing safari. Or closing a finder window. Or attempting to click something on the menu, or the dock, or ANYWHERE on the screen!
Sheesh.
“Macs don’t crash.”
“Macs are faster.”
Bull. Time for a rebuild I think…
For almost as long as I’ve had my MacBook Pro I have been ignoring the high-pitched whine it emits when the dual cores aren’t quite busy enough, and putting up with how insanely hot the system gets in normal use. (Apple recommends turning the processor speed down, and not using it on your lap. Genius.)
Today though I was confronted with a MacBook Woe that I couldn’t ignore: the battery itself, or possibly the charging circuitry, is dead. So for the first time in my brief tenure as an Apple owner I had need to make use of Apple’s customer service.
Good Lord, they don’t make that easy.
While the laptop itself is under a (limited) hardware warranty, in order to diagnose the fault you have to have some form of Apple support package. All their hardware comes with “complimentary” 90 days support, but of course that had expired so in order to continue the conversation with the tech support girl I had to buy nearly 300 quids worth of Apple Care package.
After lengthy and tedious diagnostics she acknowledged that there was a problem with the battery (duh) and has arranged for them to ship me a new one.
Her: Is it okay for me to ship it to your home address?
Me: Fine, when will it be delivered?
Her: Some time in the next 5-7 days.
Me: Riiight. When exactly? So I know to be in.
Her: I can’t give you that information, shall I ship it to your office address instead?
Me: No. I’m a contractor, I work from any one of up to ten locations with no idea a week in advance where I’ll be. You need to tell me one day I should stay at home, and I’ll make sure I’m here.
Her: Oh. How about we just try to deliver it and leave a note saying we’ll be back the next day?
Me: *sigh* Fine.
*bangs head against wall*
So I am, or my company is, out 280 quid for this level of service, plus the 71 quid “We don’t trust you” charge in case I don’t send the old battery back plus 40 minutes of my time.
I thought Apple was all “Think Different”. This feels like every other major company’s lousy customer service. (Foreign call centre too - the whole thing would have taken half the time if I’d not had to ask her to repeat herself or spell things for me every time…)
Urgh.
Oh yes, and the brilliance of the MagSafe connector (and how easy it pulls out of the laptop) can only be really appreciated when your laptop has no battery and WILL DIE IMMEDIATELY WHEN THE POWER IS REMOVED! I say again: urgh.
Richard sent me an email yesterday with a link to this article along with the message “You’ll love this one…” If you’ve followed the Windows on Mac saga recently go and read it now, if you’re anything like me and Richard you’ll have plenty to say on the subject once you’ve finished reading.
I couldn’t believe that any publication would bother to publish something like that, even as an “opinion” piece in a student paper and even only on their website. The author, who may be a veritable genius when it comes to philosophy, clearly has no idea what he (she?) is talking about when it comes to technology. They don’t seem to understand the difference between emulation, virtualisation and dual booting, and have apparently very little grasp of hardware specifics…
When a Mac starts to emulate a Windows platform completely, the computer must provide additional voltage to provide the computing power.
Ignoring the author’s misconception that the Mac is emulating Windows (it is running Windows natively on an X86 chip remember…) what’s this about additional voltage?! What?! The intel chip in my MacBook - when running XP - is pulling the same power as when it runs OS X, or the same as the identical chip that runs Windows XP in the latest HP notebook. Windows XP playing games such as UT2004 on the MacBook causes it to generate as much heat as OS X playing the Universal Binary of UT2004. It’s hot (really hot), granted, but the idea that Windows is magically making the processor run hotter than OS X will ever allow is false. It just gets as hot only quicker.
getting a Mac to run PC games will result in heartache - this I can guarantee
The author doesn’t specify exactly what heartache it will result in… My MacBook runs Half Life 2, CountStrike: Source, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Rise of Nations in some cases significantly faster/smoother than my Dell. What heartache? Heat-ache maybe, but no worse than OS X causes!
For reiteration, Macs cannot run Windows like PCs can.
Urm, yes. Yes they can. That’s rather what all the fuss was about when Apple put Intel chips inside. INTEL. x86 chips. The same instruction set that nearly every PC on the planet uses to run, oh, for example, Windows! Do you think the author understands the difference between a PPC and an Intel chip, and the reason why a Mac can now run exactly like a PC?
I can’t bring myself to refute the fifth paragraph (”My third point references to the industry.”) as it is so full of misunderstandings of the technology, the businesses involved and the computer industry’s recent history that it’s just not worth it.
Boot Camp crashes and burns? Hardly. It’s beta software. It came with a warning. Anyone who chose to ignore that warning and install it on a production machine deserves any hassle they get. That said, my installation of Boot Camp was utterly without problems and I’ve heard lots of other positive reports on various forums. I’m grateful to Apple for providing Boot Camp and the driver suite - I’d just like some of my minor niggles addressed!
The MacBook Pro is great running XP; but has several flaws which mean it probably won’t become my primary machine just yet…
- No Audio Routing
If you plug headphones into the headphone socket audio continues to come out of the speakers. This is known (and documented by Apple) but is still irritating. If I’m in the office I quite often listen to mp3s/the radio on headphones. Also, when I play games I nearly always do so with headphones on for the immersive experience… - Limited Bluetooth Support
I use my phone’s Bluetooth headset as a headset in games that support it (UT2004, CounterStrike) and for Skype calls. Either the driver in the MacBook doesn’t support the headset profile, or the hardware doesn’t support it. Either way, it’s an annoying limitation. - Heat
This is the real killer. The MacBook Pro runs hot… Even in OS X - when you push the CPU - it gets very hot. Running in XP though, without the advanced power management, it gets hot quickly. So hot in fact that the grill to the left of the keyboard becomes painful to touch. That’s no good for prolonged periods of typing! - The Trackpad
In OS X there is a tickbox for trackpad settings that “ignored unintended input” - so if you knock it with your wrist while typing it knows to disregard it. Not so for XP. Try typing for any length of time and you find the cursor jumping all over the place as you accidentally click all over your document. Grrr!
I imagine that further updates to the beta will fix some of these niggles, but for now I’m still using the Dell for day to day work and games.
One thing I did manage to do with the MacBook Pro was remap the keyboard. Now \ is in the correct place (next to left shift) as is the back tick (next to the 1 key) and I’ve given myself a right-alt key (the right command key) and a del key (next to the left cursor). So I can hit ctrl-alt-del and I have a right-alt to control MS Virtual Server properly now!
It’s a fantastic games machine; HalfLife 2, UT2004 and RoN all perform flawlessly… I just worry about the heat. I hope Apple issue a BootCamp driver update for APM.
Some of you will know of my odd status as a PC and Mac user. I switch between both depending on where I am and what I’m doing; you’ll also know of my weakness for shiny Apple hardware and my purchase of a MacBook Pro within hours of their release. So I followed with interest the competition to get Windows XP running on the MacBook, and even tried out the open source effort that resulted; eventually giving up on it when I realised that driver support just wasn’t there.
Until now. Apple just officially sanctioned dual booting on their Intel-based machines with “Boot Camp”. A preview for now (apparently of Leopard code) it creates a driver CD and then allows an XP SP2 CD to boot and install. Of course I had to try it within hours of finding out about it. Here’s how I got on….
Luckily last night I’d already downloaded and installed the latest OS X update (10.4.6). This whole “Boot Camp” thing explains why the update for the MacBook was considerably larger than the same update on my PPC based G5. The only thing left to do was download the MacBook Pro firmware update, and the Boot Camp assistant itself. With the firmware updated I could go ahead and run the assistant.
After accepting the dire warnings that this is preview software and shouldn’t be used in a production environment it allowed me to burn a CD with XP drivers for all the MacBook Pro hardware. (Well, nearly all the hardware - see later on for what’s not included.)
After building the driver CD, you must choose how much of the OS X drive to partition for Windows. I chose to give up about 25Gb for Windows - that should be adequate for testing and installing games. Also, with MacDrive I should be able to access data on the Mac partition from Windows. This was a very simple process - drag the slider around until happy and then click the button, it had finished in less than 60 seconds. Then, stick the XP Pro SP2 CD in and reboot the MacBook…
The system booted from the XP CD into a standard setup screen. No sign of any behind the scenes magic (patching system files on the fly) like in the open-source effort, it just worked… I may dig out my Vista DVD and see if whatever Apple have done will allow that to boot. 
Unfortunately the first try failed at the partition selection screen when the system hung - to the point where I had to power off. I unplugged all the usb devices I had in, and started again - this time it worked perfectly. I selected the partition to format and it started copying files across. Checking the FAQ reveals that there is a known issue: the Mighty Mouse can’t be plugged in during the first install of XP.
After the usual thrashing about, and a little over an hour after I downloaded the file I was looking at an (admittedly low res) Windows XP desktop. Success!
I put the Apple created driver CD in and let it unpack everything. The entire install runs unattended - it does the Intel Chipset, then the ATI graphics. I didn’t notice the network install happen, but all of a sudden the icons popped up for wireless and LAN in the system tray. After that came the audio install and a reboot.
When it came back up the panel was running at its native resolution. One more new hardware found wizard later (BlueTooth) and the entire system was working. Just over an hour from a machine with just OS X on to a machine running a fully patched copy of Windows XP Pro SP2.
Hardware that doesn’t work: the IR remote, the iSight camera, the sudden-motion-sensor, the ambient light sensor.
The next important things:
- How fast can it run Microsoft Virtual Server R2, and with how many concurrent virtual machines.
- And, perhaps most important: can it run UT2004, Rise of Nations and Counter-Strike: Source ?
More info to come…
The wizards (nay, geniuses) over at the Max OS X Internals Blog have developed what they’re calling BAMBIOS - software that allows legacy booting on Intel-based Macs. From their post:
For example, a regular (that is, non-EFI) version of Linux can be readily booted using this software. [...] Linux works fine, and we have made good progress with booting an unmodified Windows XP installation.
They have a mini presentation which explains a little about what they’re doing, but basically they’re leveraging the Bochs BIOS as a way to give Windows XP (or any other “legacy” X86 OS) something to talk to. Oh - and you just know that Apple love being able to refer to Windows as legacy! I’ll save the rant about the EFI-less Vista release for another time…
Anyway, this is fantastic news, and a huge step towards the dual booting Holy Grail a lot of us early-adopters have been seeking. WinXPonMac.com - are you ready to pay out?
Update: It appears that they’re not the only team to have made good progress. This guy has got XP booting - he says by patching the NT bootloader/kernel. That sounds like a less elegant solution than building a fake BIOS, but since neither group has made their solution available yet it remains to be seen how easy either of them is for the rest of us to achieve.
Recent Comments