opinions on best way to run windows on new MacBook pro?

By ftealucard, 16 December, 2013

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Hi all I know this has been brought up numerous times before so I'll keep this short. I will soon be obtaining a macbook pro with the maximum configuration, 2.6 quad core, 16GB ram and 1tb flash drive. I plan on running a copy of windows 7 home premium 64 bit that came with a desktop pc, didn't really want to shell out the money for windows 8. What would be the best way to go about it, bootcamp or VM ware fusion? Since this machine is so powerful, I assume it would run VM with not a lot of problems? That way I would be able to backup my image once all prefered apps are installed and just restore it if the main image gets hit with malware/viruses. In reading other posts, I did see that people are running in to jaws having to be reauthorized every time vm is run. With that being said, it would perhaps be better to give full resources to windows with bootcamp. In doing this, has anyone run in to any issues, especially running on a flash drive? Are there settings that may improve performance since 7 from what I understand wasn't really designed for flash? What about keyboard shortcuts such as using the fn plus function keys to toggle wifi, brightness etc? I will be looking at the bootcamp docs but thought I'd ask here first. Thanks for any thoughts.

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By Roland on Thursday, December 26, 2013 - 10:45

Hi, I have a fully configured Macbook Air 2013 and I run both, Windows 7 and Linux on VMWARE Fusion without problems. Technically there is a decrease in performance when using any virtualization software. However, I haven't really noted it so far and I like the conveniance of switching between operating systems with a single key press taking things like shared folders and bidirectional clipboard with me. I really don't like to pay for apps unless I really have to but I must say that VMWARE was a good bargain. It is VO accessible and integrates nicely. On the windows side you might want to use something like sharpkeys to reassign keys but that has already been discussed in conjunction with VMWARE. Hope this helps.

From what I was reading, windows in bootcamp won't let you switch from the NVidia graphics card to the intel graphics. If this is the case, I am quite disappointed since the battery life will probably be horrible. I read this after receiving the macbook pro and I may not be able to return it for an air. Hopefully bootcamp will be updated so that graphics switching will be a possibility, you'd think they would've had that from the beginning.