Running WindowsXP solely [Archive]

metropolitim

1st December 2007, 11:22 PM

Hi everyone,

I just bought an iMac and I'm not interested in using OSX, so I wonder if any of you guys know if it's possible to run winXP solely?

Can I just erase the OSX partition using Disk Manager in WinXP? Or will that screw everything up?

I hope you haven't erased Mac OS X yet, because yes, it will screw things up.

But I too am exclusively running Windows on my MacBook Pro. Mine's Vista (which I LOVE), but the principles are the same.

The only thing you really need from the Mac OS is the drivers to make your Mac hardware able to run Windows. You'll be miserable without these drivers, so don't even think about it.

But this is all very easy to set up. Buy your shiny new Mac, fire it up, and go to Applications> Utilities> Boot Camp Assistant. This is where you set the partition size of Mac and Windows. You'll want to leave a breathing room for the Mac OS as there will be updates to the Windows drivers, but you can leave that partition at 32 GB and be covered.

It's absolutely painless to install Windows from inside the Mac OS. Tell it that you want to reboot into Windows, where you need to finish installing the hardware drivers, and where you'll want to reformat your Windows partition to NTFS (Apple formats FAT32).

Then swing by the Windows Control Panel and make any tweaks you want to make there. (I made several.) Then download InputRemapper to keep yourself from going insane.

The one last tweak I made is to cut out a Vista logo and stick it over the apple logo on the outside of the laptop. :-)

After that, you're golden. The MacBook Pro is the best Windows machine I've ever had.

Good luck,
Tim