Anyone running Windows 8 on a Retina MBP?

By James123
in Apple (macOS)

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James123

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Hi,

I'm needing to buy a Mac for iOS/Rails development but I'm undecided if I should buy a 13" MacBook Air and keep my current Windows laptop, or 15" MacBook Pro (Retina) and attempt to use this as my only machine. I run Windows about 40-50% of the time.

Is anyone currently running Windows 8 on their MacBook Pro Retina (15")? There are various reviews which usually describe the experience as "poor" (often due to Apple not releasing the correct drivers), but these reviews are 3-4 months old, I'm looking for more recent experiences.

While at home I also want to hook up whatever laptop I get to a 27" (2560x1440) Dell monitor in a dual screen configuration with the laptop. I'm a bit concerned that this may complicate things even further, assuming the retina screen will need to have a different scale than the other screen.

Any experiences?

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BetaAddict

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I haven't tried it yet, but to my knowledge Apple still hasn't updated their drivers. I would wait for them to do so before trying it in bootcamp. In the meantime, I use it in Parallels from time to time. Works decent.

Grand Master

CPressland

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I basically live inside Windows 8 whenever I'm in the office as I use Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Outlook 2013 etc, but I run it inside VMWare Fusion.

I've literally JUST installed Windows 8 via Bootcamp also for some gaming and it installed fine, but it's unstable on Battery power, but I've not run Windows Update yet so I cannot say if this is due to the lack of the GA update, I'll report back later once I've got my power adapter.

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Luis Mazza

Posted
Posted

Hi,

I'm needing to buy a Mac for iOS/Rails development but I'm undecided if I should buy a 13" MacBook Air and keep my current Windows laptop, or 15" MacBook Pro (Retina) and attempt to use this as my only machine. I run Windows about 40-50% of the time.

Is anyone currently running Windows 8 on their MacBook Pro Retina (15")? There are various reviews which usually describe the experience as "poor" (often due to Apple not releasing the correct drivers), but these reviews are 3-4 months old, I'm looking for more recent experiences.

While at home I also want to hook up whatever laptop I get to a 27" (2560x1440) Dell monitor in a dual screen configuration with the laptop. I'm a bit concerned that this may complicate things even further, assuming the retina screen will need to have a different scale than the other screen.

Any experiences?

I got mixed results:

1. When trying to upgrade from a previous Windows 7 working installation to Windows 8, I got many incompatibility results, mainly with the keyboard and trackpad.

2. A clean installation followed by Apple's Win7 drivers worked great, considering that they don't yet support Windows 8 officially.

3. You can install better and newer Nvidia drivers on Windows 8, but I'm afraid it is not so simple. I had some problems with that, but now fixed them.

4. The retina graphics on Win8 is the worst part, as even with high DPI mode the results are very disappointing, but it doesn't seem this is going to be fixed by Apple or Microsoft. I use an external monitor with the rMPB and it works great, though.

5. The virtual machine (Parallels 8) works great with Windows 8. Actually it works better than Windows 8 itself, because retina graphics are resized automatically. But no games...

I hope this helps. :D

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