Plz clarify a couple of terms and conditions

[thomaskc]

Hello everyone!

I seek the clever minded people here with just a couple of probably quite standard questions, but I haven't found any answers do here goes:

I understand that there is a difference between how bootcamp loads windows and EFI booted windows, and people talk about compatibility and hardware performance so what I dont understand is,

Is there any actual data on the differences in what ever areas of performance?

Also how one the boot camp drivers doesn't work for people booting in EFI Mode?

So basically why is it do important for people to get EFI win mode to work? thanks

 

[jwhelan]

While I can't tell you the why EFI booting is better or worse than bios booting, I can tell you my experience with both.

I have a late 2011 Macbook Pro 13" With 256GB SSD and 500GB HD. I have the optical drive in an external enclosure.

I first installed Windows 8 in EFI mode from a USB drive. Everything seemed to work fine. Bootcamp drivers installed fine. The only issue was no audio. After playing around for awhile, I noticed that every now and then windows would not boot. And finally it stopped booting completely, it just froze at the windows logo.

I then removed the Windows 8 installation and installed in bios mode. In order to do this, I had to replace the 500GB HD with my optical drive (apparently windows will not install from an external optical drive), I then used bootcamp assistant to partition my SSD and finally installed Windows 8 from DVD. Bootcamp drivers installed fine, and audio worked. I played around with it and every thing continues to run fine. I gave my bootcamp partition 30GB. After installing Windows and then installing Visual Studio 2012 I have only 2GB free. But I think I can free up a lot of space by removing the pagefile and turning off hibernation.

My conclusion is that EFI mode was way too buggy for me and I will stick with bios mode. But when EFI worked, it booted extremely fast from a SSD drive.

 

[thomaskc]

Thanks for the replay!

Hmm so its sounds its more about the boot itself and not the performance of when everything is actually loaded?

I am running bootcamp win7 myself and it runs really well, everything works! even the fan control settings from OSX comes across in win7 automatically.

I am just curious to what all the trouble is worth