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Optimize Windows for BootCamp

G

GeniusJon

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 26, 2011
185
0
Canada
Hi everyone!

I was just wondering if anyone here is using BootCamp on their rMBP. If you are, are you using it without any tweaks or did you install a couple add ons to make the Windows on Mac experience a bit smoother? I would like to run Office 2013 on the BootCamp partition as Office for Mac is garbage; and there's a specific program for school that is Windows only.

Yes I have tried Parallels and vmWare, both of which are not as seamless as everyone makes them out to be (especially on retina Macs).

Any suggestions are welcome, thanks!
 
GeniusJon said:
Hi everyone!

I was just wondering if anyone here is using BootCamp on their rMBP. If you are, are you using it without any tweaks or did you install a couple add ons to make the Windows on Mac experience a bit smoother? I would like to run Office 2013 on the BootCamp partition as Office for Mac is garbage; and there's a specific program for school that is Windows only.

Yes I have tried Parallels and vmWare, both of which are not as seamless as everyone makes them out to be (especially on retina Macs).

Any suggestions are welcome, thanks!
Click to expand...

I use Boot Camp Assistant and run it like normal.

And also the Boot Camp drivers.

Since I use an external mouse all the time, I don't really mind the wonky trackpad in Windows.
 
I run windows on my rMBP (2012 model). I don't really have any "tweaks" other then that I used bootcamp to install Windows and I made sure I installed the bootcamp utilities from apple.

I have other utilities I run with on windows but they're more for a user experience, such as Start8 to hide the metro tiles and give me back my Start button.
 
It is a good idea to disable fast boot (powercfg -h off from Windows command prompt) as you shouldn't hibernate if you dual-boot. Other than that the apple bootcamp drivers were enough for me.
 
doynton said:
It is a good idea to disable fast boot (powercfg -h off from Windows command prompt) as you shouldn't hibernate if you dual-boot. Other than that the apple bootcamp drivers were enough for me.
Click to expand...

Why not? I prefer sleep over hibernate but I'm curious as to the reasonings.
 
maflynn said:
Why not? I prefer sleep over hibernate but I'm curious as to the reasonings.
Click to expand...
Because when you hibernate (or sleep actually) in Windows it keeps cashed your open files (and connected drives). If you then change these in another OS then when you resume from sleep you can get corruption. Windows will try to overwrite what is on disk with what it had in memory when it was hibernated and will have a problem if it doesn't exist and will overwrite any changes if it does. It isn't really OSX issue - just dual booting generally. If you don't share drives and documents between the 2 OS then it wouldn't matter but I do.
 
doynton said:
Because when you hibernate (or sleep actually) in Windows it keeps cashed your open files (and connected drives). If you then change these in another OS then when you resume from sleep you can get corruption. Windows will try to overwrite what is on disk with what it had in memory when it was hibernated and will have a problem if it doesn't exist and will overwrite any changes if it does. It isn't really OSX issue - just dual booting generally. If you don't share drives and documents between the 2 OS then it wouldn't matter but I do.
Click to expand...

But if my Mac is asleep via Windows hibernate, I cannot use OS X, since its on the same computer.
 
Last edited:
maflynn said:
But if my Mac is asleep via Windows hibernate, then I cannot use OS X, since its on the same computer.
Click to expand...
Yes you can - just chose OSX when you turn it on. When you use Windows fast start-up it saves memory to hiberfil.sys and then shuts down. When you restart the old memory contents are restored into memory. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/jj835779(v=vs.85).aspx

You can re-boot into OSX in between.

I might be being overcautious perhaps but disabling hibernate makes me feel safer (and also saves disk space). I turned it off in OSX also (sudo pmset hibernatemode 0) for the same reason.
 
tbh, I've never done that and I think you may be overly cautious. If I put my windows system to sleep, its because I'll be returning to it. If I want to boot into OS X, I then use the bootcamp utility to select the partition and reboot.
 
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