Snow Leopard, BootCamp 3.0, Windows 7: it all works
Posted by Theo Heselmans on August 29th, 2009
I received my Snow Leopard update yesterday by UPS, the day it was suppose to be launched. Kudos to Apple. Installing Snow Leopard was a breeze. My MacBook Pro certainly feels snappier. Startup time is about the same. Shutdown time is much faster. I gained 10 Gb after installation ! Haven't played with it much yet.
I read that a new version of Boot Camp was included too. As I have Windows 7 RC installed on a partition, and I usually work in Windows this way, I was hoping that this new Boot Camp version would bring me back some things that didn't work any more. Installing the Boot Camp software was a bit of a pain: it took ages (during the Intel installation part, the computer went to a crawl, but I let it continue anyway, and was rewarded). After restarting, I got all the goodies back, and more:
- Keyboards lights work again
- Screen brightness and sound level can be changed from the function keys again
- I can now finally single tap the trackpad for clicking
- And I can access the Macintosh volume (any HFS volume by the way), but only in read mode
A Mac with Windows 7 and Boot Camp (3.0) is a great experience.
Category: Macintosh | 
Technorati: Macintosh
Comments (5)
Hi Theo, Good news.
I'm going to update my big Mac:
{ Link }
Regards from Spain
Thank you for your review. Are you using a NVidia Macbook Pro? I have a MBP and find it very annoying that Windows so far only runs in performance mode. That means it is getting very hot ( so hot that it sometimes locks). Well I'll order my upgrade now.
My MBP is almost 2 years. It has an GeForce 8600M GT, with 256 Mb memory. I sometimes play games on it too. Very smooth. It runs hot, but every MBP does. I never had it lock though. Boot Camp 3.0 updates the NVidia drivers to 7.15.11.7756. I got the impression that it now lasts longer on the battery too.
Ok you probably have the older model with Intel chipsets and NVdia graphics. This one is known to work better. I already ordered the upgrade. Fair price by the way.
The newer Macbook Pros have both a switchable internal chipset graphics and a seperate NVidia card. In MacOS you can select if you want to run the Laptop in Performance mode (external card is used) or standard mode (internal chipset graphics is used). The chipset graphics is enough for normal work and keeps the Macbook cool. In performance mode (which is what Windows always has to use) the seperate card does all the work and produces a lot of heat no matter if your Macbook is busy or not. This seem to work well for many but not for me. Sometimes it is just getting too hot.