Buying a MacBook Pro then installing W7. Bad idea?

[Luke.]

I love the MBP design, but never been a great fan of OSX. Would it be really stupid to buy then just install W7 with bootcamp? Also, is it an easy thing to do? Really not very savvy when it comes to this kind of thing.

Cheers.

[HellDiver]

It's not stupid at all, it's quite normal.

In my old job we supported a lot of Apple laptops with only Windows on them.

[BigJonMcQuimm]

As above, I have this setup with Bootcamp and Fusion to enable pc use whilst logged on the mac.

Very simple to setup and share files between pc and mac.

[blank]

Seems a bit pointless as you wouldn't be getting most of the supposed benefits of a Mac.


But if it's just the design/style you like and you're willing to pay the ££££ for it then why not?



You must be able to get a very highly specced and nicely styled Windows 7 laptop for the same cash though...

[jamieboy]

Luke. said:

Would it be really stupid to buy then just install W7 with bootcamp? Also, is it an easy thing to do?

It's very easy to do - run the bootcamp app from within OSX which lets you create a new partition for Windows, then reboot with the Windows CD in and install as normal.

The only issues I've found with the current unibody MBP are that the MBP keyboard isn't the same as a standard Windows one (no # key for instance) but there are workarounds for that, and the battery life in W7 isn't as good as under OSX.

You definitely can buy an equivalent PC laptop for the same price, but I find it handy having OSX to check that stuff works, plus my wife is a graphic designer and she's a lot happier with OSX than W7.

Edited by jamieboy on Thursday 1st April 10:54