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Do any of you run Windows on a Macbook Pro?

alexd

alexd

Administrator
Staff member
I was out looking around for ultrabooks and notebooks over the last few days as my old Thinkpad X60 is on it's last legs, and wound up looking at a Macbook Pro with a 13" screen.

My concern was that I run some software that doesn't work on Macs like Quickbooks Pro for example and that other software I own is all Windows (Office, Adobe CS, Corel, etc. but sales chick said, no problem, it comes with software that allows you to load up Windows 7 and you can configure it to dual boot.

Is that actually the case? If I am running Windows 7 on it, will it be able to run the programs indicated above?
 
RumRogerz

RumRogerz

TRIBE Member
alexd said:
I was out looking around for ultrabooks and notebooks over the last few days as my old Thinkpad X60 is on it's last legs, and wound up looking at a Macbook Pro with a 13" screen.

My concern was that I run some software that doesn't work on Macs like Quickbooks Pro for example and that other software I own is all Windows (Office, Adobe CS, Corel, etc. but sales chick said, no problem, it comes with software that allows you to load up Windows 7 and you can configure it to dual boot.

Is that actually the case? If I am running Windows 7 on it, will it be able to run the programs indicated above?
Click to expand...

you will be able to run everything just fine.
also, you can get office, adobe cs and corel for osx.
if i want to run simple windows apps on my mac, i just use WINE. If you're computer savvy enough, you can get it to run almost any windows based program. WineHQ - Run Windows applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X
 
A

AgentSanchez

TRIBE Promoter
I've found WINE to pretty much suck - I've played with different configs but it ALWAYS feels like it's running on 5 year old hardware (quad core i7, 16 gb ram... no excuse). In fact ALL the viritualization platforms seem to have performance hits. VMWare fusion, however, is very very usable, but it isn't free. It is, however, the smoothest and fastest of them all.

Bootcamp runs without any performance issues whatsoever, but a macbook pro sucks balls running windows/bootcamp if you're JUST using the laptop keyboard and trackpad. You lose ALL the gesture support etc... There's an app to attempt to re-add those features but its glitchy, unstable, and not worth the trouble imo.

SO.... VMWare fusion will be the most convenient for the odd windows app. If you need serious windows horsepower, you'll need bootcamp with a two button mouse and scroll wheel. Bootcamp is also free.
 
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alexd

alexd

Administrator
Staff member
Balzz said:
Wow I didn't even realize Corel was still around.
Click to expand...

I actually like it better than illustrator for creating quick vector designs and it can export & import files in a multitude of formats...
 
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alison87

TRIBE Member
As i said in the other thread, there are quite a few Windows laptops in the MacBook price range that out-perform it in most every respect, and that you won't need to pay for an additional Windows and Office license to use. Running Windows on a Mac works perfectly fine at native speeds, just be aware that outside of Bootcamp you will be paying for the emulation software, and you will still have a keyboard with the control, fn, windows and alt keys mixed up and a halfassed trackpad.
 
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X

xtcfreak

TRIBE Member
Windows runs excellent in a virtual machine using Virtualbox. No need to dual boot for one program such as quick books.

Virtual box is free too.

Jay
 
alexd

alexd

Administrator
Staff member
Well I poked around best buy again yesterday, looking at ultrabooks and one thing I noticed - when I tried to connect to TRIBE from the Macbook Pros in the store it was hugely slower than connecting to TRIBE with any other PC notebook in the store.

What's up with that?
 
A

alison87

TRIBE Member
I'm using Mac again at work after switching back to Windows on my home computer a few years ago and it definitely "feels" slow. I think the culprit is all the bouncy stretchy animations that look totally rad the first time but get old real fast. The dock takes ages to slide in. Windows take forever to minimize. I just want to give that little guy who rolls out the Downloads stack a coffee. And it is such a pain in the ass to have to manually move and resize windows when you're used to the snap shortcuts in Windows. Not to mention the keyboard shortcuts come from some Emacs school of keyboarding where you need to hold 6 meta keys to do anything useful. And God forbid you ever actually try to "find" something in Finder. When the command line is faster you know your file browser is a piece of shit. Working on a mac is much slower, superficially. I think Mac users don't mind it because it looks sexy while it plods. Trying to use an iPhone after Android is the same experience. It's like "hey, icon, yeah you, the one i clicked, like i give a fuck about your Alice in Wonderland growth trick, just open the fucking camera already.. oh, really now you're going to roll across my screen like Brooke Shields? For fuck's sake!"

Meanwhile on the back end Mac OS is a much more stable operating system than Windows due to having a microscopically small set of target hardware to work on. You never need to worry about upgrading drivers or having a patch blow up on your specific configuration. Less viruses and malware target the platform so you're probably safer to browse porn and download torrents blindly. All the development environment Windows users need to spend hours setting up comes for free because it's already UNIX underneath. ASIO is built in. The hardware looks really nice, even if these days it's not as unique as it was 10 years ago. And there is a fanatic group of users that will help you fix stuff if it does break. So there are definitely some positives. It's just a very different computing experience to Windows.
 
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B

Balzz

TRIBE Member
Lol. Halfassed trackpad on MacBooks? Laggy iPhone camera compared to android? Now I know you're trolling.
 
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deep

deep

TRIBE Member
I dual boot Win 8.1 and the latest OS X on tje most recent Macbook Air - no problems, takes like a half hour to setup the separate partition using Boot Camp and install the operating system. There are some minor annoyances like the trackpad drivers not having all the same features in Windows as OSX.
 
T

The Peej

TRIBE Member
I run Parallels on my work machine. (severely under-powered three year old Macbook Air) and it's fucking flawless. Rather incredible really. It has something new called "confluence mode" where the Windows Apps live in my dock or apps folder as though they were for Mac. I launch Visio for example, and it opens in it's own window and acts just like it's another Mac App. Except that when I mouse over, my cursor turns from black (Mac) to white (Windows) and my keyboard layout and shortcuts change automatically depending on focus.

It's more seamless than I ever could have imagined. The windows dock items that would normally live in the bottom right toolbar are now in the top taskbar on the Mac. (the Windows 7 start menu drops down from there when needed.) When I quit Visio or any other Windows app I've decided the use the windows icons all disappear from the task bar. It's phenomenal.
 
M

mattt416

TRIBE Member
for me a macbook is the only laptop i can be productive with without an external keyboard/mouse/monitor. the trackpads are amazing compared to all other pc laptops i've tried.

if i need to use windows software (like i did yesterday when flashing my android phone), i just grabbed a temporary windows virtual machine from modern.IE and imported it into VMware fusion. it worked great and i was able to just trash it when i was done.

if you're going to spend all your time booted in to windows (or using a windows VM), then there's probably little point getting a macbook book, but alternatively that may be the driver to getting off that archaic software you're using. :p
 
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