<p>I'll be purchasing a Macbook Pro on Monday and I wanted to know the benefits of having Windows 7 installed on it (never used it yet). From those of you who are experienced with both Macbooks and Windows 7, I would like some feedback. Also, what other programs/gizmos&gadgets should I purchase for college purposes, as well as fun must-haves? </p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>I’m not a genius by all means, but what the hell is the point of buying a mac book and installing Windows 7. That’s like buying a Yaris and dropping a Corvette engine inside.</p>
<p>Program compatibility is the only reason I could think of. I’d stick to the stock operating system; no need in riling up a overzealous CS rep over potential warranty voiding.</p>
<p>And Office 2010, definitely, with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote. Or whichever one is the Mac equivalent of 2010 (is it out for Macs yet?)</p>
<p>Nice, next year I will be purchasing a Macbook Pro and use Boot Camp to run Windows 7 (professional?).</p>
<p>The reason one would want to do this is so that they can use Windows applications that are unable to be run on the OS X software on a Mac, and instead use Windows 7.</p>
<p>If you have a .edu email I think it’s still only $29 dollars for Home Premium or Professional.</p>
<p>If you do use boot camp, you have to restart the computer and switch the operating system, and if you only have 1 application that is only Windows compatible, it becomes kind of annoying.</p>
<p>Running Windows side by side with a Virtual machine is a solution too.</p>
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<p>Correct me if I’m wrong (I might be), but isn’t that the upgrade license, and not a retail copy?</p>
<p>Oh yeah, my bad that’s right. I guess if you’re going for a legitimate install you would want to get the full copy. I don’t know how much it its though.</p>
<p>NO!</p>
<p>Don’t use Windows on a Mac!!!</p>
<p>Using BootCamp will give you a ton of viruses. I’ve had the Mac I’m typing on for a couple of years and still it runs like the first day. This is because there are hardly any viruses for Macs, whereas there are tons for Windows. The second you open the internet on Windows, you’ll get hit with viruses.</p>
<p>And about the “buying a Yaris and dropping a Corvette engine into it”, I think it’s more like buying a Corvette and dropping a Yaris engine into it.</p>
<p>^ Unless you have something against Apple.</p>
<p>Unless you know why you want to, you don’t need to. There are some legitimate reasons to use Windows rather than Mac OS X, and the people who actually need to know who they are.</p>
<p>If you’re in real estate, apparently they use a Windows-only system to look up properties. Maybe you work for a business who has developed custom, internal Windows-only software. Maybe you’re doing some advanced science work that requires Windows software–Apple itself uses Macs running Windows to analyze iPhone’s antenna performance in their lab.</p>
<p>But for web browsing, videos, writing, content creation, etc–what most college students use their laptops for–OS X will do everything Windows can.</p>
<p>Yeah, I’m curious why you’d need to put windows on a mac. Sure, some people have legitimate reasons to but Mac OS X is more than fine for the average college student. If you’re worried about compatibility, why not just buy a PC? But imo, get the mac, try it out for a bit and don’t install windows unless you find you really need it. You can get a Mac version of Microsoft Office and many popular programs. If you really need windows just momentarily, that’s what computer labs are for.
Mac OS X is a beautiful thing. Give it a chance.
and as for useful things: microsoft office, possibly a printer/scanner, a camera if you like to take photos etc…</p>
<p>justadream, I recommend that you purchase Microsoft Office Student/Home for Mac.
The new iWork is great for word processing and you can save everything to be compatible with Microsoft Office, but there may be times when Microsoft Office may be needed. My kids have both iWork and Microsoft Office on their Macs. You may want to download Firefox for the rare occasion when Safari doesn’t work on a website. Use Safari as your primary browser. Use Firefox only when you need to.</p>
<p>I don’t think you’ll need to put Windows 7 on your new MacBook Pro. I have two kids in college and neither of them has Windows on their Macs. If needed, you could always use the computers in the college labs/library. Or, wait until you have a need and then install Windows. </p>
<p>Good luck with your new MacBook Pro. You’re going to love it–no glitches, no driver issues, no scans, fast, and reliable.</p>
<p>I strongly encourage you to use iWork. Theres a free 30-day trial, and its just $79 retail (10% off if you show a student ID). It reads and exports to the Microsoft Office file formats, but I almost always export to PDF if I’m sending something to a professor. PDF prevents any changes, and keeps the font and formatting settings exactly the same as on your computer.</p>
<p>It can’t do everything Office does, but how often do you have to work with an Office document with embedded Visual Basic macros? For standard text documents–essays and the like–I’ve found the conversion to be flawless. I’ve never needed to use Microsoft Office for anything since getting iWork.</p>
<p>iWork is different from Office. The biggest difference is that, rather than having controls appear from menus or on the tool bar, nearly all are centralized in the Inspector, a small window that appears on the screen. Once you learn where things are in the Inspector–not hard to do–its much more intuitive.</p>
<p>I also really like the advanced typography features that Pages (the Word competitor) includes. It produces much more beautiful documents automatically. Word processing isn’t as simple as just placing characters on a page; things like ligatures, tracking, and hyphenation can make a big difference. Word is capable of producing beautiful documents, but it takes a lot of work to get it set up properly. With Pages, its automatic.</p>
<p>Like I said above, some people really do need Office, but unless you know why you do, you don’t. Try iWork for 30 days. If it works for you, you save half the cost of buying Microsoft Office.</p>
<p>Also I recommend Google Chrome for useful programs, if you’re at all interested in another browser. I find that for me it’s faster than Safari and it’s very easy to use. It doesn’t seem to be as much of a memory hog as some other browsers. For some reason, Safari for me had problems with some sites (ex: Facebook) but Chrome has none of these problems. I’ve since updated Safari but I like Chrome so much that it’s now my default browser.
And also, Office for Mac, although useful, is not my favorite program either, so I think nick_scheu’s post is really helpful… I do use it b/c sometimes I run into compatibility issues but it depends on your needs.</p>
<p>Chrome and Safari are in the middle of an arms race at the moment, haha. They both use the WebKit rendering engine, which is excellent, but where they differ is with their Javascript engines. They swing back and forth, with whoever has the most recent release generally having the faster browser. I do believe Chrome is winning at the moment.</p>
<p>I prefer Safari myself, particularly with the new support for extensions, but Chrome is still a fine browser. If you want a little extra speed out of Safari, download the nightly build of WebKit from webkit.org. These often have speed improvements that haven’t yet reached the official Safari release, and I’ve found them to be pretty reliable.</p>
<p>Now, a lot of Windows users automatically download Firefox upon getting a Mac, but I wouldn’t recommend that. Stick it in your applications folder in case you need it (there are some increasingly-rare websites that work better with Mozilla’a Gecko engine than WebKit), but give Chrome and Safari a fair shake. They’re both better Mac browsers than Firefox.</p>
<p>Well, to be fair, a lot of games only operate on Windows, so if you need to open those .exe files…</p>
<p>But other than that, the Mac OSX should suffice for just about everything else.</p>
<p>Very true, TheAscendency. Steam for Mac and ports using Cider make this less of an issue than 3 or 4 years ago, but you still can’t go to Best Buy and purchase a boxed game knowing it will work.</p>
<p>Awesome. Thanks everyone!</p>