I finally gave in to temptation and bought myself a new MacBook. I was quite keen to try out the Apple Boot Camp software for myself, and have a native version of Windows running on my Mac.
The only spare licence I had was for Windows 2003 Server - it was left over from before we installed linux on our house server and wasn’t installed on anything any more. So, after reading about the Windows 2003 - XP conversion pack, I decided to give it a go.
Installation
Installing Windows was easy - after updating the firmware and installing Boot Camp, I split up my hard drive to give Windows a 20GB partition. The new firmware provides a nifty graphical boot loader (you can switch between installations by holding down the alt key while it boots) which would seem to allow you to boot from any bootable partition. It certainly allows you to boot from both hard drive partitions and the DVD drive if there’s anything in it. I’ll have to try installing Windows without Boot Camp at some point to see if it’s actually doing anything except providing a repartitioning app.
Once installed, 2K3 asked me to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to log in. This set me back a day since you can’t seem to type that combination on a MBP keyboard. I went out and bought a cheap USB keyboard, which seems a bit of a waste since I only needed it for 5 minutes.
After running the XP conversion pack, everything worked much like an XP-Pro installation.
Drivers
I declined the option to burn a CD with the drivers on - I didn’t have a CDR to hand - so I opened up the package, mounted the DMG file containing the drivers, and copied them to a memory stick. This seemed to work just as well.
The main hurdle came when I tried to install the drivers - the setup program only works on Windows XP. I was pretty sure the drivers were exactly the same for XP and 2003, so I set about trying to get them out of the installation package. After several false starts, I managed to extract the drivers. The command is:
Install Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP.exe /V /a
This will perform an ‘Administrative Install’ and bypass the normal installer checks. This allows the installation files to be extracted to a directory of your choice.
The drivers were pretty straightforward to install, you have to do each one manually, but there aren’t that many of them. I’ve still not managed to get everything working, Bluetooth for example so I think I may be missing something.
The main problem I have is that Service Pack 1 won’t install. It gives me an unhelpful message telling me I haven’t got enough space to make backups, or install (if I disable the backups). I’ve slipstreamed it into a copy of the installation CD, but I can’t seem to use that to upgrade the existing installation. I’ll probably have to do a reinstall instead. For the time being I’m bypassing SP1 and installing about 60 updates from Windows Update.
Keyboard Layout
Finally, I’ve been tweaking a few things to make them work a little more like they should.
I couldn’t find an appropriate keyboard map for the Apple keyboard. I tried about four different key mapping utilities without success, until I happened upon Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). This is a handy little utility which allows you to create new keyboard maps for Windows XP and 2003, and even packages them for you with an MSI installer. Below are the screenshots for the new layout I created.
You can download the mapping DLL and the MSKLC source file to use yourself. I mapped the ° (degree) symbol to Alt Gr-8 on a whim. Also, the section/plusminus key doesn’t work at all under windows.
Exposé
I remember trying a few Windows Exposé-esque utilities about 18 months ago when I first got a Mac and was pretty impressed with the idea. Unfortunately, I was less impressed with the Windows implementations.
I decided to have another look around to see if there was anything new, and came across iEx. iEx does what you’d expect, and seems to perform pretty well on the MacBook (it should do, with all that CPU power to make use of!). I’ve yet to use it in anger, but with light usage it seems to be extremely quick.
iEx is free, but is pretty basic. I’d like to be able to drag-n-drop between windows in the same way as in OS X, but that’s my only quibble.
Conclusion
I’m pretty happy with the way the install went. The only remaining problems are to do with a few drivers, and hopefully they will be fixed if I can run windows update properly, which won’t happen until I’ve managed to get Service Pack 1 installed. I’ve still to fully test this, but so far I’ve not had any problems. The platform is pretty stable. I’ll post an update if and when I get everything working.
