# Win 7 on MacBook Pro without boot camp



## joedoro (Nov 19, 2011)

Just a FYI - 

Have a 3 year old MBP with the Intel duo core 2.4GHz with 2 meg ( will be upgrading to 4meg)

couldn't resize my Win 7 partition (Camptune didn't work after I had upgraded to Win 7 from XP) so just decided to put Win 7 by itself on without boot camp since I am no longer using OSX.

Just popped in my Win 7 disc, booted from the disc, deleted all of the partitions when that screen came up and it installed with no problems. 

Then inserted the Lion disc and ran setup to install all the drivers.

Uninstalled Boot Camp (don't think it was needed) and evrything runs well.


----------



## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Boot Camp is needed, what do you think actually controls the Mac hardware? The drivers do run it, but Boot Camp is the GUI for the hardware options.


----------



## joedoro (Nov 19, 2011)

Maybe it's more correct to say that I installed Win7 without bootcamp assistant and in the process deleted OSX. And then used the Mac disc to install the drivers.

I now have a single hard disc partition of 186GB which is what the hard disk is with just windows on it.

From what I understand bootcamp assistant just creates the partition for windows and install the hardware drivers that apple wrote for their specific hardware to work with windows. And then allows one to adjust things such as how the keyboard options work, which OS to launch on startup, etc. Since I use the MPB basically as a desktop replacement connected to an external monitor and keyboard and mouse I really didn't need it so I just uninstalled it.

Right now when I start my MBP and hold the option button the screen that would normally come up when I ran Win7 under bootcamp so I could select OSX or Windows shows just Windows. When I start my wife's MB that never had windows installed on it and hold the option button I get the same screen but OSX and Recovery HD are the 2 options. So what that means to me is that when you startup, at the most basic level you have a choice as to which partition to use to boot the system. Once you choose, the machine operates the OS as if it were the only one on it. Of course the drivers are necessary for interaction of the hardware and OS but the only thing special about the Apple drivers is that they were written by apple. For example, I've upgraded the nVidia drivers from nVidia and they work fine.

Now I understand from other searching that I might have trouble running some old programs in XP mode since that function has to be turned on in the BIOS and from what I understand you can't access the BIOS on a Mac. But since I had never used that it doesn't matter.

Everything is working fine and in fact have upgraded my memory and in the process it was discovered that I had one of those faulty logic boards and it was replaced free by the Apple service center I went to. 

They then ran all of the hardware dignostics they normally run without OSX being on my machine.

So the point of this experiment was to see if indeed one could run Win7 on a MBP without having OSX on it and the answer is "yes."


----------



## ozziesironman (Jun 30, 2010)

sorry, maybe its so early i missed something, but is there a reason to run ONLY windows on a MacBook? kind of an expensive Dell....


----------



## joedoro (Nov 19, 2011)

Not too early  Agree that's why I just bought a faster i7 Dell Desktop with double the meomory and fater videocard with a triple 22in monitor setup for nearly a grand less than a 27" iMac. The Mac tax is just getting too high for me.

But for my MBP, with XP having gotten old and Vista a debacle, decided to giveApple a try as it was time to replace our laptops a few years back. So we bought Mac Books and I ran XP on boot camp for my games.


OSX is nice, once you learn the nuances of it. but since it's the applications that drives how one uses a computer and not the OS it basically came down to the apps I use. Tried iWork and while slick, it's useless for business unless everywhere you work is Mac based. For example, trying to save a numbers files as an excel file and then using it in excel just doesn't work; you lose formatting, column headers, etc. So bought Office and that was better, but since Office for the Mac and Windows are always just a little different, again it was just an added frustration to use. And the big thing - no One Note!

Then it seemed like alot of the Mac software, especially the stuff written by Apple, doesn't have alot of flexibility. Great if you work or can adjust your work to how it is intended to be used. For example, trying to get yo9ur tasks from iCal to the iPhone. Can't do, so you need another application. So I found myself using stuff that runs both on OSX and Windows and since most of the games I play are PC based, I found myself spending more and more time in Windows. 

Then I upgraded XP to Win7 which is behaves very much like OSX. Again once you learn the nuances, you can do things very intuitavley like you do in OSX. So I was going to just increase the Win partiton, but there is no easy way to do this except for camptune, but unfortunately in upgrading from XP to Win7 that no longer worked.

But the main reason I gave up on OSX was Lion and iCloud. Put it on my wife's MB after upgrading it to 4GB and getting her a new iPhone 4S. Will work great for since her oranization needs are not that great. But for me it's a different story.

Siri is pretty neat and integrates well with Lion. However, the biggest use of it for me would be reminders and unfortunatley, reminders in Lion and on the iPhone and iPad are very limited. Essentially no sorting or filtering. So continue to use evernote, while nice is no One Note. Did use the iPhone One Note app, but very limited. 

Had relied on iDisk, but that's gone (or soon to be.) Now it's a cumbersome sort of downloading office files to my iPhone or iPad and then running them in Numbers or Pages and then saving as office docs and synching with no easy way of just dumping files there. And as for photo management, I still haven't figured it out. 

So the hope that there would be a nice integration between my phone,contacts,calendars, todo's, files, and photos all in one place was premature. Also, each device has a different appearance and UI. Why do developers have a different interface for the same app? 

Anyway, this is not to denigrate OSX, but rather to explain why it just doesn't work for me. As for the future who knows, but I've just started using a Windows 7.5 phone and it's integration with office and skydrive which integrates with windows live is very adequate and the Metro UI works just so well for me. One screen that I can pin any bit of information to is just so intuitive to me. If MSFT hype is to be believed, then it will be great to have the same interface on your PC, tablet and phone.


----------



## ozziesironman (Jun 30, 2010)

Interesting info. I didn't realize how incompatible osx office stuff is with it's windows counterparts. Guess you learn something new everyday huh?


----------



## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Nice to hear the complete story from someone. I'm glad you have found a solution for you. For me, iOS and OS X work great, as well as the apps I use, like iWork and iLife. I never had any luck with doing things in Windows, hence why I had no issue buying a MacBook. I'm sure when I need to upgrade my system, I'll get an iMac. But I'm not a fan of Lion, so we'll see. Good luck.


----------



## joedoro (Nov 19, 2011)

Too bad Steve Jobs blew off Visicalc ( why would anyone want a spreadsheet on a personal computer? ) otherwise we'd all be working on Macs, but at the end of the day it's the apps one uses that determines what platform is used.


----------

