How to Survive Boot Camp (and Run Win 7 on a Mac) matt buchanan. 10/22/09 2:00pm. • An Intel-based Mac • Free disc space! More on system requirements here. It's easy, probably. Well there are three ways to run Windows on a Mac. Bootcamp, Virtual machine software or both. Bootcamp creates a separate partition (space) on the boot drive which allows you to directly install a Windows version Apple supports (Win 7), this allows you to directly boot into Windows as use the full resources of the computers (3D games and other intense hardware requirements) Virtual Machine software lets you install Windows or other operating system like Linux like it's a common file, which opens in the virtual machine program under OS X. You can then use the virtual OS as a real one, installing programs etc and assigning the hardware to what OS as needed. Virtual Machine software has the ability to image a Windows BootCamp partition and make it a virtual machine file, so the same Windows can be run under OS X. Since it's the same hardware, there are no issues with the copy protection with Windows. Far as updating the Windows Bootcamp version and vise versa, I don't think that occurs, you have to check. Virtual machine software has the advantage of running many flavors of operating systems, where Bootcamp only supports Windows 7. Virtual machine software has the disadvantage of requiring two operating systems and a virtual machine software program running in addition to the hosted operating system and it's programs, so there is a lot less performance ability for the hosted program than a direct boot. If your not going to tax the computer or play most 3D games, then running Windows in a virtual machine is by far the easiest and safest method. I calculate on a quad core CPU that Windows operates about 1/5 the performance it would if directly booted. I used a light weight 3D game for this test, it got 40 fps while in a virtual machine OS and 200 fps directly booted. All one needs is about 50-60 fps max. You specs say you got a mere 320 GB hard drive, my advice is to run Windows in a virtual machine software as Bootcamp you tend to need more in a partition to exand into, as it's lot involved setting it up and it can't be cloned off, the partition increased/decreased and then reversed cloned, it won't work. So with the virtual machine software Windows is just a file, that increase or decreases as you use it. This way your not wasting space on a large Bootcamp partition. M3ZR wrote: i was wondering how much HDD space and RAM and processor i should assign to this? For Windows in VM, you don't need to set the hard drive space, it should scale the vm file accordingly. Far as RAM and processor, set it according to the recommended 1 core and the RAM setting. ![]() ![]() Once you start giving it more RAM or another core, you start having issues with your OS X programs. M3ZR wrote: i weither or not if they are saved onto my mac portion will windows read it and ETC. I assume you mean if you save files in bootcamp will your VM Windows read the file? Likely not, OS X is the go between OS and it reads the NTFS format of Windows usually, but not writes unless you add software. Easy to use movie software for mac download.
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