General frustration: installing Windows on a Macbook Pro

[HYHYBT]

All right: I'm back in school, studying accounting. Like it so far, though it's hard to tell after only four days.

One class *everybody* has to take is on Windows and Office 2007. I'm a Mac person, and have been one for about 20 years. But hey, Windows is good to have, and I'll probably need it for other things at some point, and anyway I've been wanting to have both ever since Apple switched to Intel, so why not now? And hey, since I'm installing Windows and Office anyway, why not upgrade to Snow Leopard at the same time? What could go wrong?

Well, so far, it's taken 7 1/2 hours. "That's not so bad," you might say. But what I've gotten for that is, essentially, nothing at all! See, a few months ago I wound up reformatting my hard drive. I knew then that at some point I wanted to install Windows as well, so I partitioned the disk and left the FAT32 side empty, thinking that would be a step in the right direction as well as ensuring that I didn't fill the drive up and have no room left.

So this afternoon I got started. I decided to do the Snow Leopard upgrade first. Upgraded in place, no trouble, so far so good.

Spent the next few hours downloading the 900+MB that Software Update said I needed. No problem. So far, so good...

...until I put the Windows disc in. It sat there qute a while, then reported only one large partition and wanted to reformat it before proceeding. Uh oh.

Back to Mac, and the Help screens... OK, so I just have to run Boot Camp Assistant first, no problem.

Uh oh again: Boot Camp Assistant says it can only work with single-partition disks! If I hadn't tried to prepare in advance, I'd be done now, but instead I have to start over. REALLY over. As in update my backup, reformat, install Snow Leopard again, recover everything else from the backup, partition with Boot Camp Assistant, and THEN install Windows. And I have to get it all done tonight, and it's already 12:30 AM and it's only about 2/3 of the way through the backup update! It's not really my poor MBP's fault, but I'm still liable to damage it if anything else goes wrong tonight. The downloaded updates will just have to wait.

Thanks for listening.

[RootedPhoenix]

Sometimes, as much as I love them, computers are a gigantic pain. They just ARE.
Windows, Linux, Unix, MacOS, old, new..... Every single one is irritating at some point.

Hopefully your frustration with this episode is nearly over. *offers chocolate and gummy candies*

[HYHYBT]

All seems to be well... it's up and running again, anyway, though at this rate it will take a *week* to get all the updates installed.

The Windows disc was XP, service pack 2. But hey, so long as it WORKS! Going to bed now, for two hours anyway.

[lordlundar]

Well, a good rule of thumb is if you are going to do something you haven't done before, plan ahead for a LOT of time to be used. I had to do a full dual boot rebuild of 2 machines one day. 12 hours later I finished.

That said, with the intel chips being put into macs now, there came the assumption that apple hardware is fully compatible with windows software.

Umm, no. Or rather, not totally. Though it is doable, macs still do not like anything but the apple OS on them, and at best barely tolerate other systems AFTER a fair bit of tweaking. It's kind of like trying to put a building frame in a house of cards. Is it doable? Sure. But it requires a fair bit of work to do it without it collapsing.

[HYHYBT]

It worked beautifully once I started going about it in the right order Only thing is that I have no right-click in Windows when it's running by itself, and if I were doing that often I could get around it easily enough by using a mouse.