Installing the Windows 8 experience on a Mac: poor support for the retina screen

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 going to install win 8 on the 2011 imac and 2010 MacBook Air to see what happens! Here are our installation records that may help people who don't like to wait for Apple to update their drivers.

installation process

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

• A Mac that supports a cougar, with at least 20GB of free disk space, and, of course, much better.

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

• If your Mac has an optical drive, or if you use a MacBook Air model as early as 2011, you'll need a win 8 installation DVD (You'll also need an external optical drive for earlier air).

• 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.

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

After you've prepared these things, 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 (for MacBook Air, retina MacBook Pro, imac computer, and Mac Mini with no optical drive), create Windows USB installer from the ISO file.

(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 this problem is easy to solve.) ）