How Does Bootcamp Work?

[skysailing]

Hello All.

I have the newly updated Retina MacBook Pro and I plan on purchasing three games through the site store.steampowered.com
-BioShock: Infinite
-Tomb Raider

I have decided to NOT go the route of purchasing VMWare or Parallels. Instead, I would like to use Bootcamp.

Don't judge me, but I just realized I have no idea what the hell that is and how the hell to even get to a screen or something. I need "the idiots guide to bootcamp. step by step".

 

[swerve147]

Hello All.

I have the newly updated Retina MacBook Pro and I plan on purchasing three games through the site store.steampowered.com
-BioShock: Infinite
-Tomb Raider

I have decided to NOT go the route of purchasing VMWare or Parallels. Instead, I would like to use Bootcamp.

Don't judge me, but I just realized I have no idea what the hell that is and how the hell to even get to a screen or something. I need "the idiots guide to bootcamp. step by step".

The Step by Step you need is already contained within your Mac. From your Launchpad go to the Other folder, and click on Boot Camp Assistant. In the first screen that pops up, click on Print Installation and Setup Guide. Then exit out if you want to read it before proceeding (CMD+Q)

The Installation & Setup Guide is pretty good if you follow it step by step. HTH.

 

[skysailing]

The Step by Step you need is already contained within your Mac. From your Launchpad go to the Other folder, and click on Boot Camp Assistant. In the first screen that pops up, click on Print Installation and Setup Guide. Then exit out if you want to read it before proceeding (CMD+Q)

The Installation & Setup Guide is pretty good if you follow it step by step. HTH.

...and this is why you are awesome. Bookmarking this right now and thank you. Do you by chance know how Steam works? What basically happens when you download/try to install a game? Does it just save the file to your desktop? do you recommend getting windows game from Steam on a Mac?

 

[swerve147]

Steam downloads game files and saves them to a folder within your hard drive, so the games do not stream, if that's what you're asking. The entire game file is kept on your hard drive. A typical game takes anywhere from 7 GB (e.g. Black Ops) to 16+GB (Skyrim + Dragonborn/Dawnguard/Hearthfire/mods), so if you're an avid gamer and like to play multiple games at once you should take that into consideration when deciding on how much disk space you want to use for your Windows partition. I have a 500 GB drive and created a 128 GB partition for Windows 7. I have Skyrim, Black Ops, Assassins Creed III, L.A. Noire and Sleeping Dogs installed and I have about 10GB free space. This is with nothing else installed in Windows (absolute barebones Win 7 Home Premium), the only reason I use Windows at this point is to play my games on Steam.

You can of course delete and reinstall games as you like to save space, but unless you have a fast connection you'll be downloading and re-downloading 16GB files, obviously not fun.

Steam is head and shoulders better on Windows than OS X. Windows gives better gaming performance by a significant margin. You can install Steam on a Mac, and certain titles are cross-platform (Assassins Creed II, Witcher 2, pretty much the entire Valve/Source library), but with the possible exception of the Valve games the PC versions run much better.

 

[takeshi74]

Don't overlook this resource as well:
http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/

I have decided to NOT go the route of purchasing VMWare or Parallels.

If you're doing more than just gaming then keep in mind that you can also use Fusion and Parallels to run your Bootcamp partition as well as launching Bootcamp directly.

do you recommend getting windows game from Steam on a Mac?

Depends on the game.

 

[skysailing]

Steam downloads game files and saves them to a folder within your hard drive, so the games do not stream, if that's what you're asking. The entire game file is kept on your hard drive. A typical game takes anywhere from 7 GB (e.g. Black Ops) to 16+GB (Skyrim + Dragonborn/Dawnguard/Hearthfire/mods), so if you're an avid gamer and like to play multiple games at once you should take that into consideration when deciding on how much disk space you want to use for your Windows partition. I have a 500 GB drive and created a 128 GB partition for Windows 7. I have Skyrim, Black Ops, Assassins Creed III, L.A. Noire and Sleeping Dogs installed and I have about 10GB free space. This is with nothing else installed in Windows (absolute barebones Win 7 Home Premium), the only reason I use Windows at this point is to play my games on Steam.

You can of course delete and reinstall games as you like to save space, but unless you have a fast connection you'll be downloading and re-downloading 16GB files, obviously not fun.

Steam is head and shoulders better on Windows than OS X. Windows gives better gaming performance by a significant margin. You can install Steam on a Mac, and certain titles are cross-platform (Assassins Creed II, Witcher 2, pretty much the entire Valve/Source library), but with the possible exception of the Valve games the PC versions run much better.

Such great information. Really looking forward to playing.

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Don't overlook this resource as well:
http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/

EXCELLENT. Thank You.