If you have an Apple Mac Pro, instead of wrestling getting the 32-bit version of Vista (or XP) on the machine, where you can only access 2GB of RAM, just put the Vista x64 version on! It works phenomenally well right out of the box. Here’s a few pointers on what I did on my 2.66 Mhz Mac Pro, 4GB RAM, ATI X1900 machine if you’re thinking about doing it. Note that I put Vista on its own hard disk and did not partition up an existing drive.
- Booted into OS X, and told it to use the new disk as the Windows partition. Boot Camp set up and booted directly off the x64 DVD
- I have an ATI X1900 with dual monitors. Vista setup flaked out with both monitors on the card by flashing the screens like a disco so I had to disconnect the second monitor and reboot. Now that Vista is on the machine, the initial boot that shows the green bar is flaky, but settles down as soon as the main screen shows up.
- I don’t know if it was because I have a two drive RAID 0 for my OS X disk or because the USB keyboard was hung, but the initial Vista setup screens took ten to fifteen minutes to come up. Once I unplugged and plugged in the Mac USB keyboard, things went fine.
- The core Vista system has all the drivers built in except for the sound drivers and Bluetooth (I do not have an Airport Express card in the machine). Realtek, the sound system manufacturer, already provide Vista drivers so surf to the Realtek download site to get them. Thanks to the Apple Support Mac Pro discussion forum for the link. I haven’t been able to find any Bluetooth drivers, but since I’m not using Bluetooth keyboard or mouse, it’s no big deal for me. I’ll post if I can find an appropriate driver.
- The performance rating was only a measly 5.5. 🙂 Turns out the disk was the lowest rated item! Everything else was a 5.9 with the graphics a 5.8.
- Booting into OS X, followed by booting into Vista has the same time mess-ups as you would on a 32-bit system. I solved that by taking AppleTime.exe from my MacBook Pro and setting it to run in HKLMSOFTWAREWow6432NodeMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun. If you don’t have a Macbook Pro to steal AppleTime.exe from, create the Windows XP driver disk from Boot Camp and run ‘”Install Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP.exe” /A /v’ from the CD. The AppleTime.exe is in the <extracted directory>System32 directory.
- Obviously, there won’t be any keyboard support for the Mac keyboard, as on 32-bit that’s done by a device driver. The volume keys work, but the eject key doesn’t. No big deal because you can right click on the DVD drive and select Eject from the context menu. I guess I could hook up a Windows keyboard, but I like the feel of the Apple keyboard.
- Explorer shows two additional removable drives on my system, which I think are the RAID 0 drives. However, for obvious reasons, I’ve not poked at them very much!
I’ve mentioned to several of my friends that I bought a Mac Pro and they questioned my profligate ways. When I went out and priced computers, it turned out that the Mac Pro was cheaper than comparable machines from traditional PC manufacturers. Not only did I save money, it’s the quietest desktop I’ve ever owned and it sure looks good. Best of all, I have the best of both worlds in a single box: OS X and Vista!
<edit 2/15/07: The 2GB limit in 32-bit Vista/XP is not a Windows limitation, but a Mac BIOS problem. Sorry for the confusion.>
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I have installed both 32bit and 64bit vista on mac pro 3.0 ghz, 10gig ram, only problem is the bluetooth driver...rest, perfect
OMG, I want your machine! :)
I too am running vista on my Mac Pro but have had some Hard Drive irregularities. There are times I get 30MB+ write speeds and others when I get 3.5MB. Have you noticed this at all?
Other than that it runs spectacularly. I currently run the 32-bit version because I develop in Eclipse and it doesn't like 64-bit atm. So 3GB of my 5GB memory can't' be addressed, which sucks. But I bought an 8GB Corsair Voyager flash drive and am using it as a windows ReadyDrive. It significantly sped up program loading time and especially image browsing. Now when I start the Windows Photo Gallery the thumbnails appear immediately rather than slowly loading. All in all I have been very happy with Vista on my MacPro(except the memory issue).
Joshua,
I've only run the 64-bit version and haven't seen any problems at all with the write speeds. Is there any way to force Eclipse to use 32-bit?
So much more work would happen at Wintellect if I hadn't installed Vista and downloaded the Hold 'Em
I just installed Windows 2003 Server R2 x64 on my new Mac Pro 3.0 GHz with 4GB RAM. Works great except for sound, couple of unkown Intel devices, etc.
Important: ATI's x64 driver for Radeon X1900 will not instally when you run the Catalyst 7.2 for XP 64 installation. It gives you "Video driver not found". To install it:
1) Make sure you have .Net 2.0 installed (just go to Microsoft and get the x64 installation for .Net 3.0)
2) Run ATI's Catalyst for XP x64 (ignore the errors)
3) Go to Device Manager > Display Adapters and update the Standard VGA driver manually. The Catalyst installation should have unpacked the driver into something like: C:ATISUPPORT7-2_xp64_dd_ccc_enu_41238Driver
Result: A fantabulous working Mac Pro with a full resultion 32bit color Apple Cinema 30'' screen!
Also, I couldn't get wireless networking to work first. But then I found a beautiful solution on another blog:
Use the R140747 driver from Dell. Apple's Airport Extreme is just a Broadcom card. Again Dell's installation barfs ("Harware not supported"). Let it unzip (I did it on another machine, a Dell, then coppied the INF files et all over to the Mac Pro). Then install the driver manually from the Device Manager.
Now I'm trying to load the Realtek driver to resolve the missing sound issue. Then I'll have to deal with the dreaded (but not so important) Bluetooth issue..
More progress on getting Windows 2003 Server R2 x64 running on a Mac Pro.
Sound is now working. All that was need was a patch update for the whole system from http://update.microsoft.com. Appearantly something was wrong with the Universal HD Audio Bus driver.
Still some unkown devices showing up in the Device Manager. The ethernet controllers don't seem to have the right drivers. But so far I don't have the need to hardwire this machine to a network. So I guess I'll work on that later.
My guess is that I have gotten this desktop machine running Windows 2003 Server R2 x64 as good as I can on almost any desktop computer After all server OSes are not ment for machines with big screen resolutions, fancy sound and peevish single users...
I am trying to install Vista x64 on my 2.66 Mhz Mac Pro, 2GB RAM, NVidia 7300gt.
I have not tried installing on a seperate physical hard drive yet, but...
Boot camp does not acknowledge the DVD at all.
Any thoughts??
Thanks,
A noob.
I have a imac dual intel 17" and I have been trying to get the mini-dvi to svideo to work.
Is there a known fix to get make the svideo out to work with vista?
Andreas - Thanks for the updates on Server x64!
Club Canberra - My x64 partition is on it's own physical drive. I didn't think that Boot Camp would be happy with a split OS X/Vista x64 drive so I didn't even try it. On my MacBook Pro, I could not get Boot Camp to recognize the XP CD (32-bit). What I did was hold down the Option key at boot and selected the CD from the Mac bot menu. That should get you going.
Gaelen - That sounds like a video driver issue. If you're brave, download the latest from the manufacturer and give it a whirl.