Putting Windows 7 on RMBP

[StuMcBill]

Do you think there will ever be a way to run BootCamped windows off an External USB Drive?

A 64Gb USB flash drive running Windows would be sweet! Maybe a bit slow unless it was USB 3.0 though?

 

[dccorona]

Definitely want to do sw development natively? I have the base MBPr with 16GB RAM, I run Win7 with Parallels I assigned 8GB of RAM to the virtual machine, and 4 of the 8 "cores" chose the faster virtual machine option and use Windows with Eclipse, and pretty heavy JCreator projects, all while running things like the iOS emulator and sometimes Dreamweaver on the Mac side ALL without any slow down, it runs perfectly. The ONLY reason to use Boot Camp would be not wanting to spend money on Parallels (in which case you can use free VM software such as Oracle's Virtualbox) or doing some pretty heavy Windows-only graphics work, or gaming. You're wrong about your development statement.

it's not about performance...editing suites do need a fair bit of power, but it's really not all that much. Most computers can run them (the microsoft surface tablet will even be able to run visual studio). The reason is that anything you add to the picture has the potential to cause issues with your software, and be difficult to determine (bugs, if you will).

Running in an emulator/vm could create issues that are very difficult to track down (why do you think we have to do on device testing in addition to running in the emulator?).

Of course, this is less of a concern for phone apps, but when you're writing native desktop software, you want to build it natively. It's actually a good idea to do some testing in a VM when you're in your testing phase of development (if you plan to officially support VMs that is), but I wouldn't want to deal with developing in it. I'd wait until I knew everything worked well and was ironed out before introducing something that can cause all sorts of new bugs to the picture.

 

[Soccer5se]

Yes, you can run your VM from an external drive. I do it regularly from a USB drive.

Yes, you can install it now. When you want to move it to the new machine, make sure the VM is shutdown, not paused, and it will ask when you start for the first time on the new machine if the VM has been moved or copied.

Thanks a lot. Which do you think would be faster, using a 16GB USB drive or an External HDD?

Thanks

Rich

 

[area5x1]

Thanks a lot. Which do you think would be faster, using a 16GB USB drive or an External HDD?

Thanks

Rich

A good USB 3.0 flash drive with fast 4K read/write speeds (necessary as operating systems have a lot of small files to deal with) will demolish your average external HDD. The only decent flash drive I know with the specs I described is the Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0 flash drive.

 

[TLewis]

it's not about performance...editing suites do need a fair bit of power, but it's really not all that much. Most computers can run them (the microsoft surface tablet will even be able to run visual studio). The reason is that anything you add to the picture has the potential to cause issues with your software, and be difficult to determine (bugs, if you will).

Running in an emulator/vm could create issues that are very difficult to track down (why do you think we have to do on device testing in addition to running in the emulator?).

While doing software development using native bootcamp is fine, it's often not really necessary -- a virtual machine can be perfectly fine. However, there are cases when a virtual machine won't work well:

• Anything that requires a nonstandard device driver. For example, if you're developing a new USB hardware widget, accessing the USB bus can be buggy in a VM. Also, special hardware device drivers may not work in a VM.
• Anything that does a lot of disk I/O. Disk I/O in VMs can be much slower than running native (bootcamp). This can significantly affect, for example, visual studio build times.
• Anything that does "fancy" graphics rendering (beyond your everyday line drawing, bitmap display, area fills, etc., etc.), such as games. These may be slow, not work, or be buggy. This may also cause some windows features (e.g, DirectX) to not work in a VM.
• If you're unlucky and run into some virtual machine graphics rendering bug. (I've never run into this, but it's certainly possible.)

Over the years, I've done windows software development in a virtualbox environment running on linux, and I can't remember ever seeing any issues other than the above. Compilations work fine, if slower, and debugging works, too. If you're just developing plain, office-like apps, a virtual machine should work, although the build times will be longer.

You certainly have a valid point about eliminating any possible VM-induced issues when testing, but I've never seen any bugs caused by a VM. Perhaps, I've been lucky. 😀

 

[Libertine Lush]

Watch out for hibernation. If you want to be able to shut the lid of your windows machine that's another 8 or 16gb. I have an 80 gb boot camp partition with 35 gb free after installing chrome, steam, and MSE

So what happens in Windows, with hibernation turned off, if you close the lid of an Apple laptop? Presumably, you can still sleep it?

Thanks.

 

[bockscar]

You can start here to figure out which version you would prefer. 🙂

I don't bootcamp. I run Fusion (Parallels works well too. My school offers Parallels for free, but I needed Fusion to set up Visual Studio and SQL Server.)

With Fusion or Parallels, you can connect the image to the virtual machine and install from there, without even having to burn a disc.

Different schools have different ways of installing software, so your experience may be a bit different.

Is there a reason why you want to use bootcamp instead of running Windows in a virtual machine? I hardly ever run Windows, but when I do (and sometimes I have no choice), I run it in Fusion.

I was thinking of buying Parallels.

It doesnt support Visual Studio? I might need that for school.

 

[Dangerous Theory]

OP: Windows 7 and 8 can be written to a 4GB USB drive for installation. The files end up being about 3.7GB I think.

 

[redwarrior]

I was thinking of buying Parallels.

It doesnt support Visual Studio? I might need that for school.

Someone else may be able to help you here; I'm no expert. Having said that, I was using Parallels, but when I started working with Visual Studio I got file and authority errors. (It's been over a year, so I don't remember exactly what the errors were.) It was very frustrating. After some research I found that the way that Parallels maps the drives didn't play well with Visual Studio. However Fusion has worked fine for me for the last year. If you are going to be doing schoolwork and using Visual Studio in a virtual machine, I highly recommend just using Fusion. If you really want to use Parallels, get the free trial and install Visual Studios and work with it some. I think this discussion may be what my problem was.

Let me know what you decide to do and how it works for you. I'm interested. 🙂