When my friends with Macs wax poetic, I like to reply that my MacBook Pro is a beautiful piece of hardware (trackpad aside – I still prefer Lenovo’s track point), and “…it runs Windows 7 beautifully.”
Once Windows 8 came on the horizon, of course, I wanted to take a look…
I got my MacBook Pro working with the Windows 8 Developer Preview until February 29th arrived, bringing with it - at not far past 9am - Windows 8 Consumer Preview. And then I found that I didn't remember all the little tweaks to get Windows 8 going on the Mac. So I thought I'd collect some of those here to help me remember when future versions of Windows 8 arrive - I fear it's too much to hope that this is the penultimate, not when they're not even calling it a beta yet.
First up was getting the MacBook to boot off of the bootable DVD containing the Windows 8 installation. Whoops, I definitely forgot that, but luckily my housemate remembered. He used a product called refit, which gives him a boot menu, but in my haste to get Windows 8 installed last time, I skipped that part.
So, to get the MacBook to boot off DVD:
- Hold down the ALT key during the boot process.
- When the OS options appear (in my case, for instance, those are Macintosh HD and Windows), select Windows.
- On the pullout menu after that, select Windows again (not the EFI option).
- Watch closely for the "Press any key to boot from CD/DVD..." option to make sure you press the "any" key before it's too late to boot from the DVD. Whoops.
Note, I still hate the MacBook Pro trackpad and the basic drivers it rides in on. The basic drivers give you mouse tracking functionality, but clicking is only of the press to click variety - no single or double tapping and I have no idea how to right-click.
Next step is getting the Apple Boot Camp software installed to provide better trackpad functionality.
- Get Boot Camp 3.0 installed. This is a required step - you can't do the updates from Apple's support site without 3.0 running. Of course, Boot Camp 3.0 requires Windows Vista or Windows XP, SP 2.
- Put in the Apple OS install DVD. It will install Boot Camp 3.0. But, while Windows 8 recognizes compatibility issues, it will not by itself alter the compatibility settings, and Boot Camp will refuse to install.
- Get an explorer window open to the Boot Camp installation folder. Since I don't know how to right-click with the basic drivers, this involved me getting a command prompt open, switching to the DVD drive and then CD-ing into the Boot Camp folder - where the "setup.exe" resides. Then, do "start ." from the command prompt to open an explorer at that location.
- Select "setup.exe" and then pick "Troubleshoot compatibility issues" from the Application menu of the explorer window.
- Don't use the recommended settings - this will apply Windows XP, SP 3 as the compatible level and Boot Camp still won't like it.
- Select the option to do your own settings and continue. Select the option saying this program used to run under older versions of Windows and continue.
- Select "Windows Vista, SP 2" as the compatible version and then "test this program" to run it.
- Select "run without help" when Windows 8 still complains about the program having compatibility issue.
- Voila - Boot Camp will run this time. Go through the installation and let Windows 8 reboot at the end.
- Upon next login, the Apple Software Update utility will offer to install Boot Camp 3.2, and you'll be up to date.
After that, run Boot Camp, activate the "TrackPad" tab and turn on all the options - that will allow single tapping to click, right click via a two-fingered tap, and double tap to click and drag. I also like to turn on click lock in the standard mouse settings so that the "click" stays in effect while dragging even if I have to lift my finger - I tap again to "drop" once I'm done dragging.
Note, I’m still not crazy about the Boot Camp trackpad drivers. Even given my bias for the Lenovo Track Point, there are just too many little things left undone. But, at least it’s better than the barebones version with Windows 8.
