"Dummy" instructions on how to play WIN games on MBP

[eVolcre]

I just received my 17" MBP this morning. After going back and forth between the 13 and 17, I decided to go with the 17.

At the moment all I do with my current 17" is research, write and do some light photo editing. It's starting to make me feel guilty about underusing this monster.

I'd like to get into some games and play them on the Windows side. COD, AOE and MS Flight Simulator are what I'm looking at. I'm pretty sure my machine can handle these.

Questions ...

How do I go about doing this? Simple instructions please. I know a little bit about bootcamp. How do I install it and then put a WINDOWS OS on it? Which WIN version should I get/download? Any specific drivers etc needed? and finally ... do you have to dedicate a partition to Windows when installing?

All I will be doing is playing games on that WIN side. I have OSX versions of all the other programs I need.

eV

[zrbecker]

You should consider Windows XP for your operating system unless you have a reason for wanting to use Vista. XP should be faster.

I believe there is a cd that has a set of drivers for windows.

Yes you will need to create a partition for windows, bootcamp should do this for you.

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/boot_camp_install-setup.pdf

[eVolcre]

I don't have a Windows license. WIN 7 is a free download which is why I thought I'd use it instead of spending the money to buy one

eV

[zrbecker]

I heard the drivers apple supplies don't not support Windows 7. So you may have to do some searching to get everything working. Otherwise Windows 7 should work fine.

EDIT: Apparently the drivers from mac fully support Windows 7, so ignore my previous statement. I must of been going off old information. Thanks for clarifying iGuardian & Beric.

[iGuardian]

Windows Seven is a free download, however the application Microsoft gives you to download it with is not compatible with Mac OS.

You can "illigally" get the RC through a torrent. Although it's not really illigal as you can still get the product key, legally, through Microsoft.

To get the RC search for it on any number of torrent sites and download it with your torrent downloader of choice (i.e. Transmission, uTorrent, etc).

Then you need to burn the Windows ISO to a DVD, but make sure it's not a DATA DISK and is a BOOTABLE DVD.

[iGuardian]

I heard the drivers apple supplies don't not support Windows 7. So you may have to do some searching to get everything working. Otherwise Windows 7 should work fine.

The Drivers in Mac OS X Leopard fully support Windows 7. I'm using Seven as we speak with thouse drivers and it works fine.

[eVolcre]

Sounds like a lot of work. Lets hope the games are worth it :)

I'll do this later this week once I'm done playing with the new machine. Thanks all for your help, I'll post in here once complete.

Cheers,

eV

[Beric]

Use Windows 7 to play games on my Macbook all the time. It was definitely worth it.

You need a non-Safari browser to download the RC.

The drivers supplied on the OSX disk WILL work with WIN7.