Review: Boot Camp 2.1 + Windows 7

Posted Wednesday, April 8, 2009 at 9:19 pm by Jason Cartwright |

After recently acquiring a brand new Aluminium MacBook, I was interested to see how it ran Windows 7.

After firing up Boot Camp Assistant, I partitioned 40GB of the 160GB drive for Windows 7. Installed Windows 7 Build 7068 and anxiously awaited the results.

A couple of Windows Updates and it was good to go.

Enable Aero
Firstly issue to tackle was that Windows wasn’t running the Aero goodness. A quick jump into the Personalize settings and a change of theme and Win 7 was back 2 the way it was intended.. Transparently

Multi-touch Trackpad
Quite simply this just doesn’t work. The standard trackpad mouse movement works fine, but multi-touch does not. Even more annoying is the lack of a right-click option. Anyone familiar with the latest MacBooks will know there are no buttons with the trackpad, it is the button.

After hitting The Google for while I found a “Multi-Touch Trackpad Update”, but it made no difference. I also came across a utility that allowed you to use hold the option key + trackpad click to activate the right-click menu. A couple of problems with this, After restarting it would need to be manually launched, now sure I could set a scheduled task to launch that app on startup, but that’s hardly a solution.

What I’d really like to see supported is the simple multi-touch gestures like in MacOS X. Even just the 2 finger ones would be good. But my strongest complaint about the trackpad has to be that tap-to-click doesn’t work.

Screen Brightness
Despite Windows 7 supporting some neat new power-saving techniques like diming the screen after a period of inactivity, the hardware has to support it. Apparently the MacBook’s gorgeous LED screen, Windows 7 can’t control it’s brightness. The net effect is that it runs at full brightness, killing your battery-life. Not 2 mention at that brightness, it’s actually hard on your eyes.

By the way I also tried the Boot Camp Update 2.1 for Windows Vista 32 to no avail.

Performance
The 2.0GHz Macbook actually fairs really well in the Windows 7 Performance Index Rating with a Overall Rating of 4.3.

I guess we have to wait for Boot Camp 3.0 for these issues to be fixed ??