How to install Windows 8 system on Apple Mac

WINDOWS8 official version has been released for some time, many friends have tried, this article small series for you to introduce how to install the WIN8 system in the Mac system.

Many Mac users occasionally need to use Windows applications, and virtual machine solutions such as Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, and VirtualBox are often the most convenient. This can result in some loss of performance, but for most people, the convenience of running programs without restarting is sufficient to compensate for this flaw.

But playing games is an exception. With virtualization solutions, 3D performance can be drastically weakened, or even completely non-existent (if you use VirtualBox), because most Macs lack a state-of-the-art graphics processor and are not comparable to Windows devices at all.

You can use boot camp to install Windows on your Mac, which means relying on Apple's Windows driver to get everything working. The problem is that Apple is not very active in updating Windows drivers. When a new version of Windows was launched, the problem doubled: the Boot camp's support for Windows 7 dragged on for about 3 months, and now something similar happened to win 8. Technology media arstechnica.com expressed strong dissatisfaction with this:

Go to his official support! We're just going to install win 8 on the 2011 imac and 2010 MacBook Air to see what's going on! Here are our installation records, which may help those who don't like to wait for Apple's update drive.

installation process

To install boot Camp on the Cougar version, you need to:

1, a support for the Puma Mac, free disk space at least 20GB, of course, more will be better.

2, Win 8 or win 8 Pro product key. Let's say you're using a 64-bit version of Windows.

3. If your Mac has an optical drive, or you use a MacBook Air model earlier than 2011, you'll need a win 8 installation DVD (you'll need an external optical drive for earlier air).

4. If you are using a 2011 or 2012 MacBook Air, or any Mac without an optical drive, you will need an external optical drive and a win 8 installation DVD, or a 4GB or larger USB memory stick and a Windows 8 ISO file.

5, a FAT-formatted external hard disk, or a blank CD or DVD, used to store Windows driver files.

After you have these things ready, you start boot Camp Assistant from Spotlight (or from applications→utilities), which partitions the drive to install Windows, download the required driver files to your external hard drive, and ( Create a Windows USB installer from the ISO file for the MacBook Air, the retina MacBook Pro, the imac computer, and the Mac Mini without the optical drive.

Figure: Download the Windows driver with the boot Camp assistant.

However, the old Mac users will find that the installer also needs a Windows installation DVD, you do not have the option to create a USB drive-with the optical drive, you can not choose any other method. Oddly enough, the MacBook Air of 2010, 2009 and 2008 is the same, but these devices do not have an optical drive when they ship, so the owners have to get an external optical drive before they can continue.

After formatting the hard drive, let the boot Camp assistant reboot the computer and install Windows into the newly created boot Camp partition. Note To format the boot Camp partition as NTFS, but do not delete it-this will break the partition and ask you to redo it from the beginning.

The Windows installation process is simple--Enter your product key, create a user account, and the hardest part is done. When the Start screen appears, insert the external hard drive that contains the Windows support file, open it, and run Setup.exe.

Figure: Install the boot camp support software.

There is no problem with the Boot camp installation-you just accept all the set defaults and wait on the line, it installs all of Apple's driver software and Apple Software Update (Apple software updates), and when it prompts you to reboot, you reboot.

Most windows 7-compliant programs and drivers are also compatible with Windows 8. Fortunately, this article also applies to many Apple Boot Camp software, including hfs-formatted partitions that read only access to your Mac. On the Boot Camp Control Panel, you can select the default boot partition and adjust other system settings, as in OS X.

Although there are some minor problems, such as some stacked graphics can not be used, and can not access the FileVault encrypted volume, but loaded with win 8 does not cause a major system-wide problem.

Figure: Some superimposed graphics are not available in Windows 8.

Driver issues

The biggest problem, especially for gamers, is the driver's problem. Depending on the MAC model you use, you may need to find and install additional drivers-some 2009 and 2010 Macs use the Nvidia chipset, and they need to download a separate chipset driver.

Figure: The NVIDIA chipset for this MacBook Air is missing some drivers, but the problem is easy to fix.

The bigger problem is that the driver is outdated, especially the graphics driver. The Boot Camp 4.0 software was launched in the summer of 2011 and has not been updated since, so you may find that its driver version is too old.

Image: Driver version may be very old

But with just a few clicks, you can get new drivers-Apple's PC graphics chips are standard, so they use standard PC drivers. The following table lists the graphics chips used by different Macs, their drivers, and considerations. All drivers apply to the 64-bit version of Windows 8.

Support for the retina

Some MacBook Pros use a Retina display. We have installed Windows 7 on a 15-inch retinal MacBook Pro and found that 200% of the scaling effects are uneven, good and bad. But win 8 should be improved, right?

There's really not much change. The problems with Win 7 still exist, some icons and text look good, other graphics (including the mouse pointer) look dazzling, the biggest problem is still uneven-different programs are very different-some programs look great, others are messed up ( Some programs also choose to ignore zoom settings completely.

Metro apps are a little bit better overall. Every application I use, from win 8 's own mail and calendar applications to the New York Times and the Kindle app, is a great magnification. But not all apps do, like the metro version of Chrome, and it's not going to zoom in.

Figure: The start screen has a separate zoom setting, you need to start → control Panel → easy access, and turn on "make everything bigger on your screen."

Image: Most Metro applications are performing well, but chrome and other applications remain problematic.

Conclusion: We don't need official support.

Mac has a variety of configurations, so it's hard to generalize. But on the whole, running win 8 on your Mac shouldn't be a big problem. The effect of official support may be better, but it will not be a big deal if you upgrade now.