Windows 7 on MacBook

Having a MacBook is something I am quite proud about but then I am not ready to give-up the Windows that I have known all my life. I have been using Windows 7 for over a year and what a cool OS I find it to be. Even though the Mac OS X Snow Leopard is cool too. I still want my Windows running on it. What's the use of having an Intel-based processor if I can't run Windows as well. Even Linus if I choose to.

I installed Windows 7 on my BootCamp drive and it was smooth though Apple recommends on Windows XP and Windows Vista. After installation, I installed the bootcamp tools supplied by Apple. All my devices seems to work fine. One by one I checked them and tick them off in my head: Wifi- check, bluetooth -check ....

I decided to look a bit more under the hood. Fired up Device Manager and alas, two errored devices. Apple USB Ethernet and Co-Processor does not seem to have the right drivers. Fumbled around for hours without success to getting them to work. I can't live without an ethernet port even if the co-processor does not seem to matter initially; some computation will have to suffer.

Come Google to the rescue (thanks for not censoring anymore in China). Found out some other people have encountered this and no clear-cut solution until I came across a post by tnkgrl Mobile. In the post, a link to the driver is provided.

The Windows XP driver provided works like magic.

ADAM on Windows 7

Recently has a need to program authentication for an application using ADAM. This is something I have done in the past so got a good existing code I could leverage on.

Alas! ADAM would not install on Windows 7. I It kept returning “Out of Storage” error!

This has been a known problem in Windows Vista as can be seen in the blog post Shawn Cicoria – CedarLogic, Extemporaneous Mumblings

Tried out these tricks and still got another error message on execution of the adaminstall.exe

Intel VT not in HP nc6400

Just think it time to check out the Windows 7 XP mode out and after wasting 445MB of my monthly internet Quota to discover that my HP nc6400 most priced notebook will not run XP mode.

Windows 7 XP mode requires Intel VT for hardware assisted Acceleration to run. I exactly don’t know whom to blame, Intel or Microsoft or HP.

Intel for failing to include such feature but of course they got processors with these feature present. HP for choosing to use a processor in a business/performance based device like the nc6400 and finally Microsoft. How in the world should this not just be a boost requirement. Other virtualization applications like VMware don’t make this compulsory so why should this be. I could expect that this works but some performance pain if Intel VT missing rather than an outright failure.

I hope this gets fixed in the final release.