Finally installed Windows 8 to Bootcamp(to non-mac users, this means that the windows now runs on native apple hardware rather than a virtual machine, Apple lets you install windows for dual boot like that and they even providethe drivers for their hardware, which can be downloaded when we setup the bootcamp).
Now I realize that the rumors are true. Windows runs faster on a mac than on a PC 😀
Heres how you do it on a mac:
1) Goto Applications/Utilities and open the bootcamp assistant.
2) If you have a superdrive, then the option to create a bootable USB stick won’t be available. The options would be to simply download the Windows Support Software(the drivers) and the option to install Windows 7(Windows 8 is still not in the market; only special groups like IEEE Computer Society and some premium academic members have access to it now). But those drivers provided by apple works fine on Windows 8. Leave both of those options checked if you are running for the first time.
3) Now, it will download the Windows Support software. It will ask you to put in an empty CD/DVD so that it can write the downloaded software into it. Theres also the option to provide external harddisks but, they have to be formatted to use FAT.
4) Now it will ask you to choose the partition size. You can drag the divider between the available partitions to choose the size.
5) Now in normal cases the partitioning process shouldn’t take long. But if your disk is fragmented, then the wizard will do a fragmentation operation before proceeding with partitioning. A faster way to do this would be to create a partition of the desired size with the disk utility and then delete the partition followed by re-sizing of the original partition to get the full space back. If this is done in advance, then the partitioning done by bootcamp assistant won’t take long. If the setup fails at this point, you can recover the lost space by runnning a repair thru disk utility, but from the recovery console(Command+R during startup).
6) Once this done, it will reboot automatically and start the Windows Setup. The rest is pretty much the usual windows setup procedure. HOWEVER, DO NOT MODIFY THE PARTITION LAYOUT. DO ONLY FORMAT THE PARTITION LABELLED AS BOOTCAMP AND PROCEED TO INSTALL WINDOWS INTO THAT. ANY OTHER CHANGE CAN LEAD TO LOSS OF THE MAC OS AND THE BOOT LOADER, THEREBY MAKING THE MAC IMPOSSIBLE TO USE UNTIL TAKEN TO A SERVICE CENTER AND GET A NEW COPY OF THE OS< FOR WHICH YOU WILL HAVE TO PAY.
7) Once the setup is done, install the Windows Support software that was downloaded earlier.
8) You may have to customize the settings for keyboard and trackpad using the bootcamp control panel.Now you're good to go and experience the Windows along with the high performance of the Mac hardware.
