Disappointed by the Boot Camp beta

I have to admit that I am rather disappointed by Apple’s Boot Camp, even though it is admittedly still in Beta.

Here are the problems I have run into.

  • The drivers Apple provided for my MacBook Pro are very shoddy. Windows often hangs indefinitely when shutting down, a problem I believe is caused by bad drivers.
  • Speaking of poor drivers, sometimes Windows XP on my MBP complains of a “power surge on port hub” and then disables a USB port, sometimes when nothing is in the port.
  • The cool “use two fingers on the trackpad to scroll” feature is not supported in Windows.
  • It’s much harder to change screen brightness and volume in Windows. (I think it's Ctrl+Shift and the appropriate F key.) Also, adjusting the screen brightness (which defaults to the brightest setting and does not change with the light sensor) has often crashed my computer.
  • There is no way to right-click without third-party software or an external mouse. (Here's the fix.)
  • There is no delete key on the MBP keyboard, a big problem when running Windows. (Change your useless second Enter button into a delete key.)
  • It’s a nightmare to repartition your hard drive again with Boot Camp. You have to delete your Windows partition and then run Boot Camp all over again. It gets even worse if you try to make the Windows partition almost as big as the Mac partition. I’ve been struggling to do this for six days now.

There are positives. For example, I configured my laptop so both Windows and OS X installations of iTunes and Firefox use the same settings. Bookmarks and cookies are th same in both OSes, as are my songs, ratings, and playlists. (Tip: Keep it all on your FAT partition and then create symbolic links for OS X.)

I hope all of you running Boot Camp are having a better time of it! Leave a comment to let us know how you are doing.


July 25th, 2006. (Updated: July 25, 2006 at 11:06am.)
Alan Hogan (@alanhogan_com).  Contact · About