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It has finally arrived...and I have a minor question

L

ls10flpanyc

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 5, 2008
25
0
I am now using my new Macbook, black, 1GB RAM (soon to be 4GB) 250GB HDD machine! I am so happy to no longer have to deal with that awful Sony Vaio, which gave me problems and it was barely four months old.

Anyway, my two questions are: I am a law student and need Windows to use my Mac for exams, so how hard is it to install Windows on the Macbook through Bootcamp, and where can I find a link to instructions? And would you recommend I get MS Office if I am going to be working with people who are mostly using MS Word rather than getting Pages, or will Pages be sufficient enough/easy enough to open and save Word documents?

I will admit that I did not do any research yet in regards to my first question (I am playing with all the new features my old Powerbook without Leopard did not have), but it would be helpful to get any input/advice from those who have dealt with installing Windows XP (I do NOT want vista) on their Mac, especially if there are things I should be aware of that wouldn't be readily obvious. Thanks a lot! I'm so glad to be back on a Mac, you have no idea.
 
well, boot camp assistant has instructions that can be printed out and are very detailed. basically, you put in the disc and osx reboots into the windows cd and its very easy
make sure its 32 bit, 64 bit wont work
(please note boot camp may not be installed by default, but it should be on the leopard disc)

pages can open .doc and .docx files, as well as more basic ones
it can also export as .doc, and its very good, although not 100% prefect

there should be an iwork trial, see if it works for you, if not, but office (theres a new version out on jan 15th, but some packages bought at the moment have a free upgrade to office 2008)
 
I could have sworn that 64-bit does work, but the drivers that Apple includes on the Leopard disc are built for the 32-bit version and that some of them might not work. Not a big deal, I guess, just go trolling around the Internet for 64-bit drivers for the same hardware. There must be a list somewhere...

Here we are! Audio: http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/SOUND-CARD/REALTEK/
Ethernet: http://www.intel.com/design/network/drivers/index.htm
Graphics: you can get from ATI's site
Um... Wow. I didn't know something as basic as Ethernet was needed. Good luck finding the others!
 
Seems to me that unless you're going to be playing games in Windows, it makes a lot more sense to just use Parallels or VMWare Fusion to install Windows in OS X and virtualize it.

If you're trading files back and forth with Office users, just wait for Office 2008 to come out for OS X and get that. I prefer iWork, but I don't have to exchange files with anyone (except final PDFs, so).
 
philgilder said:
well, boot camp assistant has instructions that can be printed out and are very detailed. basically, you put in the disc and osx reboots into the windows cd and its very easy
make sure its 32 bit, 64 bit wont work
(please note boot camp may not be installed by default, but it should be on the leopard disc)

pages can open .doc and .docx files, as well as more basic ones
it can also export as .doc, and its very good, although not 100% prefect

there should be an iwork trial, see if it works for you, if not, but office (theres a new version out on jan 15th, but some packages bought at the moment have a free upgrade to office 2008)
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot. I'm gonna figure out the Bootcamp/XP thing once I find my XP disc. What exactly do you mean by 32-bit and 64-bit, and what is the difference? I'm assuming I want 64-bit because it is better...
 
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