Macbook Pro & Windows 10

I always like having options, espeically when it comes to technology. I’ve had a Macbook for years now and I love using it almost everyday as it’s always close at hand to me. My PC runs Windows and Linux and is the workhorse of my life. Seriously, I don’t know how I haven’t needed to replace anything yet, considering I was running it with a badly-attached CPU fan for a week! I think the only thing I really miss and can’t live without when I’m using OS X is the .NET runtime and C# which is why I almost always have BootCamp set up with the latest Windows build.

 

I recently upgraded my SSD to a whopping 480GB (thanks, OWC!) and because I was finished with my 3rd year project (included a .NET web app and Azure cloud arch.) losing BootCamp for a while was no biggie. One problem that plagued previous Windows versions with BootCamp, and specifically retina screens was the extremely terrible resolution scaling. It was awful and many applications were basically unusable. Even the Windows UI wasn’t scaled correctly and it made for a traumatising experience. I’m happy to say Windows 10 fixed this with much better support for Hi-DPI displays, and it looked miraculous!

If you’re installing Windows 10 for development like me, make sure you give yourself plenty of space for Visual Studio 2015, my choice of installs was close to 30GB which included emulators etc. BootChamp is a great tool for quickly booting from Mac to Windows and it takes out the messy startup/restart key combos that are ALWAYS different on different types of Macs. The only problem I found with BootCamp is the Ethernet connector (Thunderbolt adapter) which doesn’t recognise it unless it’s plugged in before boot. This was present in Windows 8 too, so it could just be like that. I’m not sure if it’s like that for all Thunderbolt connections, but I’ll definitely test it out.

I think the only major danger when doing this method of dual-booting is the possibility of an accidental partition wipe of OS X during the Windows installation. I was prompted to choose the partition for Windows, and was presented with all 4 partitions on the disk (2 being System Reserved, 1 being OS X and the other is for Windows) It would be very easy to choose the OS X partition accidentally, I’ve done it before so I would know! Just remember to choose the partition called BootCamp for the Windows location, if it is called that on your machine. Otherwise you’ll be in for a long and gruelling Internet Recorvery process of re-formatting the entire drive and re-installing and updating OS X (sad times)

Shot while upgrading the SSD to 480GB!
The steps to installing Windows 10 via BootCamp is identical to Windows 7 or 8, BootCamp actually only refers to Windows 7 during the process. All you need is the readily-available Preview ISO  , a USB thumbdrive bigger than 4GB and you just have to follow the instructions after that. It can take quite a long time for the Windows files to be prepared by BootCamp , and drivers must then be installed within Windows to provide the BootCamp Control Panel and other requirements. I find BootCamp to be a much better experience on Macbooks than Parallels or another type of Virtual Machine, and tools can be installed to access files from the OS X partition (see HFSExplorer)