Leopard and Vista 64 on a MacBook Pro

November 8th, 2007

My Leopard installation went flawlessly and time for complete install was well under an hour. I was the glad recipient of a $10 OS X 10.5 because my MBP was purchased after October 1.

At the time of this writing, I am sadly using my MacBook Pro (MBP) running Vista x32, which is addressing only 3 of my available 4G of aftermarket RAM.

The attempt to install Vista 64 went swimmingly all through the Boot Camp process until some of the drivers failed to install properly. It turns out the incompatible drivers were for the both wireless and Ethernet network devices and the iSight built in camera on the MBP. While I can easily live without the trick camera in the laptop lid, I cannot function without network access.

A quick trip to the web (running OS X) revealed that although people were running Vista x64, few were doing so flawlessly. Although most of the problems I read from others trying to install Vista64 on their MBPs were regarding the ATI and video drivers, I experienced none of those issues. My screen looked great.

I hope Apple releases drivers for 64 bit Vista simply because it is frustrating to be unable to address that last 1G of RAM. Frankly, that is my one and only reason for wanting the OS.

I am running Vista 64 on my Dell and have actually run into a few issues installing software on the system, and I don’t need it for development projects. I am looking for the extra RAM for running VMs in Virtual PC. Although Parallels is great, I want to run the VMs released by MS to the development community.

I’m sure drivers will get out there. As soon as they do, I will be there with bells on. I should add that the installation of Vista x32 via Boot Camp was flawless.

David Starr

  • Danilo

    HEY I FOUND THE DRIVERS TO RUN YOUR ETHERNET CARD ON VISTA X64 MACBOOK (SANTA ROSA) PRO, THE MACBOOK PRO IS USING A MARVELL YUKON AND U CAN FIND THE DRIVERS HERE http://www.marvell.com/drivers/ HOPE IT HELPED….STILL NO DRIVERS FOR WIRELESS OR iSight OR BLUeTOOTH

  • Guilherme Carvalho

    Well, if you want to install vista x64 just becouse of that “1 gb of ram” forget it, unless you use serious and heavy software like maya, 3d studio, or stuff for real HD video editing, you will not use (by now) more than 2 gb of ram, and 32 bit software adress till 4 gb of ram (in case of windows, it get 1/2 of your memory for kernel use).

    stop with headaches and use 32 bits…

  • rune

    No. Under 64 bit windows, each 32 bit process get a full 4 GB virtual memory space. Kernel memory is reserved far beyond the upper 2GB, so if the process is marked as “large memory aware”, it will get plenty of space.

    In addition, even though you are running only a single memory intensive process, it never hurts to set aside even more memory for file cache… That additional 1GB might come in handy, and it now makes very little sense to insist on running a 32 bit OS. Get with the program Guilherme.

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