The MacBook Pro Experiment - Replacing my PC
Since all the new Intel Macs can run Windows, it may not seem like much of an issue to discuss replacing my PC with a Mac Book Pro (MBP). But the sticky part of doing such a thing isn’t the processor or even the graphics card but the notebook’s limited storage capacity. In particular, I’m referring to the 120GB hard disk in mine. It’s too small to support everything on OS X and Windows I’d like to run.
Obviously, once I started wanting to replace my PC with my Mac Book Pro altogether, hard disk space became the critical issue. Originally, I had planned on buying a Mac Pro and using it to replace the PC; and at some point, I might still do that. For the moment, the debt I’ve encumbered just with the Mac Book Pro is going to tie me up for a year. Add to that the fact I’m not ready to let go of my dual processor 2.0 GHz G5 PowerMac and you can understand why I’m looking at using the MBP to replace the PC instead. But I really couldn’t afford to give up more than 32GB or so of hard disk space for Windows operations, and even that would keep me from carrying everything on the Mac OS X side of the notebook I want to. That’s not to say I was fat on the Windows side; a look said I already had more than 32GB of applications and data on my PC.
The easy way to attack the problem was to use some kind of external hard disk. Since the MBP came with a Firewire 800 port, I decided to purchase a FW800 external hard disk case and then use a spare ATA hard drive in my closet to test the set-up. I bought a SIIG FW800/400/USB 2.0 case from Fry’s for $99.
I knew Boot Camp would only partition a system’s boot drive but wasn’t sure if it would partition an external drive, so I tested it by putting an 80GB Hitachi 7200 RPM 3.5 inch hard drive in the SIIG case, connecting it to the MBP, and then using Disk Utility’s Restore function to clone the MBP’s internal drive to the SIIG external. Once that was done, I booted the MBP on the SIIG by holding down the Option key and selecting the Firewire drive icon when it showed up. Boot performance was noticeably slower and not anecdotally any faster than I had seen using a FW 400 hard drive. Once I was into the Desktop, I downloaded a copy of Boot Camp (1.1.2 Beta), installed it, and then ran it to partition the drive. It refused, giving me an error message that said it could not be used to partition an external drive. I had hoped to actually have two Windows based installations I could use. One was going to be a small Windows set up on the MBP internal drive (20GB) and the other was going to be a much larger Windows set-up on an external drive (50GB). Now, I had to rethink how I was going to get there.
Obviously, I had to install Windows XP on a partition on the internal MBP hard drive. But could I achieve the same thing by partitioning the external drive as a NTFS drive and using it to hold either huge Windows programs that wouldn’t fit the MBP partition or those applications I only used sporadically?
To test that, I installed Boot Camp on the MBP (internal drive) and then had it give me a 32GB partition. Once that was done, I followed its instructions, installed XP Pro on the MBP, and booted into XP. I then hooked up the SIIG external drive and used XP’s Disk Management tools to repartition the drive (into a single, primary partition) and reformat the entire drive into a NTFS format.
I expanded my test rig by hooking the MBP to my 23 inch Apple Cinema Display, my sound system, and to a Logitech Force Feedback USB joystick. After turning the MPB on and shutting the lid, I used the keyboard and mouse to reboot the system into Windows. System video resolution maxed out at 1440 x 900 rather than the display’s 1900 x 1200 native resolution, but the screen presentation was still both usable and pleasant there, so I left it alone. I installed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 onto the MBP’s internal hard disk, ran it, and could tell no difference between it running there or on my PC at the default 20 frames per second. I next installed Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator onto the external drive and it ripped along as it always did. (I felt CFS ran better on the external drive than FS2004 on the internal.) My next test point required I install Visioneer’s PaperPort 6, which I still use with an Epson scanner as my electronic file system. I wanted the Paperport application and data files to reside totally on the external hard drive. But I would not be connecting to the external hard disk as a matter of course, so I wanted to see if Windows would protest with either error messages or by crashing when the drive was not connected. To find out, I shut down the entire system, disconnected the external hard drive, and then brought the MBP back up into Windows again. It behaved normally, only giving me an error message if I tried to launch a program loaded on the external.
An inventory of my PC showed it uses a 120 GB hard drive as its main drive and a 60GB and 80GB as extras. I intend to remove the 120 and install that in the external hard drive case and use it as my Windows auxiliary hard disk. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the PC itself, but I’ll be putting out a note in the next few days to see if anyone in the family wants it. The 20 inch Apple Cinema Display it’s attached to will be going to my son Tim who needs it to replace a flaky 17 inch display on a PowerMac G4. I’ll get more desk space in my office and a simpler life with one less machine to physically maintain and gain a PC upgrade anytime I upgrade my Macs. I’ll run the MBP this way unless and until I upgrade my PowerMac to a Mac Pro, but the beauty of this whole thing is that it relieves me of any immediacy to do that.
Obviously, once I started wanting to replace my PC with my Mac Book Pro altogether, hard disk space became the critical issue. Originally, I had planned on buying a Mac Pro and using it to replace the PC; and at some point, I might still do that. For the moment, the debt I’ve encumbered just with the Mac Book Pro is going to tie me up for a year. Add to that the fact I’m not ready to let go of my dual processor 2.0 GHz G5 PowerMac and you can understand why I’m looking at using the MBP to replace the PC instead. But I really couldn’t afford to give up more than 32GB or so of hard disk space for Windows operations, and even that would keep me from carrying everything on the Mac OS X side of the notebook I want to. That’s not to say I was fat on the Windows side; a look said I already had more than 32GB of applications and data on my PC.
The easy way to attack the problem was to use some kind of external hard disk. Since the MBP came with a Firewire 800 port, I decided to purchase a FW800 external hard disk case and then use a spare ATA hard drive in my closet to test the set-up. I bought a SIIG FW800/400/USB 2.0 case from Fry’s for $99.
I knew Boot Camp would only partition a system’s boot drive but wasn’t sure if it would partition an external drive, so I tested it by putting an 80GB Hitachi 7200 RPM 3.5 inch hard drive in the SIIG case, connecting it to the MBP, and then using Disk Utility’s Restore function to clone the MBP’s internal drive to the SIIG external. Once that was done, I booted the MBP on the SIIG by holding down the Option key and selecting the Firewire drive icon when it showed up. Boot performance was noticeably slower and not anecdotally any faster than I had seen using a FW 400 hard drive. Once I was into the Desktop, I downloaded a copy of Boot Camp (1.1.2 Beta), installed it, and then ran it to partition the drive. It refused, giving me an error message that said it could not be used to partition an external drive. I had hoped to actually have two Windows based installations I could use. One was going to be a small Windows set up on the MBP internal drive (20GB) and the other was going to be a much larger Windows set-up on an external drive (50GB). Now, I had to rethink how I was going to get there.
Obviously, I had to install Windows XP on a partition on the internal MBP hard drive. But could I achieve the same thing by partitioning the external drive as a NTFS drive and using it to hold either huge Windows programs that wouldn’t fit the MBP partition or those applications I only used sporadically?
To test that, I installed Boot Camp on the MBP (internal drive) and then had it give me a 32GB partition. Once that was done, I followed its instructions, installed XP Pro on the MBP, and booted into XP. I then hooked up the SIIG external drive and used XP’s Disk Management tools to repartition the drive (into a single, primary partition) and reformat the entire drive into a NTFS format.
I expanded my test rig by hooking the MBP to my 23 inch Apple Cinema Display, my sound system, and to a Logitech Force Feedback USB joystick. After turning the MPB on and shutting the lid, I used the keyboard and mouse to reboot the system into Windows. System video resolution maxed out at 1440 x 900 rather than the display’s 1900 x 1200 native resolution, but the screen presentation was still both usable and pleasant there, so I left it alone. I installed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 onto the MBP’s internal hard disk, ran it, and could tell no difference between it running there or on my PC at the default 20 frames per second. I next installed Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator onto the external drive and it ripped along as it always did. (I felt CFS ran better on the external drive than FS2004 on the internal.) My next test point required I install Visioneer’s PaperPort 6, which I still use with an Epson scanner as my electronic file system. I wanted the Paperport application and data files to reside totally on the external hard drive. But I would not be connecting to the external hard disk as a matter of course, so I wanted to see if Windows would protest with either error messages or by crashing when the drive was not connected. To find out, I shut down the entire system, disconnected the external hard drive, and then brought the MBP back up into Windows again. It behaved normally, only giving me an error message if I tried to launch a program loaded on the external.
An inventory of my PC showed it uses a 120 GB hard drive as its main drive and a 60GB and 80GB as extras. I intend to remove the 120 and install that in the external hard drive case and use it as my Windows auxiliary hard disk. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the PC itself, but I’ll be putting out a note in the next few days to see if anyone in the family wants it. The 20 inch Apple Cinema Display it’s attached to will be going to my son Tim who needs it to replace a flaky 17 inch display on a PowerMac G4. I’ll get more desk space in my office and a simpler life with one less machine to physically maintain and gain a PC upgrade anytime I upgrade my Macs. I’ll run the MBP this way unless and until I upgrade my PowerMac to a Mac Pro, but the beauty of this whole thing is that it relieves me of any immediacy to do that.
posted by Andy Foster at
7:03 PM
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