Pair your remote with your Mac

If there are multiple Macs around when you’re using your remote, you’ll find that pressing a button once will perform the same action on every nearby Mac. To solve this problem, you can pair the remote specifically with a single target Mac. Open System Preferences, and then open the Security & Privacy pane.

At the bottom is a button labelled Pair…. Click this button, then follow the instructions that appear by holding the remote near your Mac and holding down the Menu and Next buttons on the remote. (Next is the button on the right-hand side of the ring at the top of the remote.)

Once you’ve done this, your remote and your Mac will be paired, meaning that using that remote will only control that one Mac.

Send your Mac to sleep with the remote

When using your Mac as a media center, you may wish to put the computer to sleep once you’re done. To do this quickly, you can use your remote. All you need to do is hold down the Play/Pause button on the remote. After a few seconds, a graphic will appear on the screen and your Mac will go to sleep.

Set up custom actions for your remote

By downloading the free utility BetterTouchTool, you can set up custom actions, which will be performed when you press specific buttons on your remote. This is great if you don’t use your remote for controlling iTunes or FrontRow, since you can override the default actions (play, next, pause, etc).

Once you’ve downloaded BetterTouchTool, you can add custom actions (called Gestures in BTT) by clicking its icon in the menu bar and choosing Preferences. Click Gestures at the top, then Apple Remote and other.

Next, click Add new gesture at the bottom of the screen. You can then select a ‘gesture’, i.e. a button on the remote, from the drop down in the lower left. After that, choose an action from the other drop down in the bottom right corner, or type a keyboard shortcut in the box.

For instance, you could set up an action which locks your computer when you hold down the Menu button on the remote by setting the gesture to Menu, Holding and the action to Show Loginscreen. (Note that since OS X doesn’t have an explicit ‘lock’ feature, this is the next best thing since it requires you to enter your password to get back into your Mac afterwards.)

Change the startup disk and eject CDs

As your Mac starts up, if you hold the Menu button on the remote, you’ll see the same menu as if you hold the Option key on the keyboard – a list of available startup disks. You can then use the remote to select a disk, and boot from it using the Play/Pause button.

In the same menu, you can also use the Volume Up button to eject a CD or DVD after selecting it.

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What you’ll need

• A Mac with at least 2 GB of RAM and at least 20 GB of free hard drive space.
• A disc burned using the ISO of the Windows 8 preview, available to download here, with a burning program such as Toast.
• A hard drive backup, in case everything goes pear-shaped.

Method

1. First, open the Boot Camp Assistant, which can be found at Applications > Utilities > Boot Camp. Once opened, you’ll see a screen explaining what Boot Camp does, and warning you to make a backup.
2. After clicking Continue, you’ll be asked whether you want to download Windows support software or if you have it on a CD or DVD. Make sure to select the second option; you won’t actually be installing the support software, since it won’t work with the Windows 8 preview. Then click Continue again.
3. The next step is to choose how large to make the Window partition on your hard drive. A Boot Camp operating system must be installed on a partition of your internal drive; it can’t be used on an external drive. The partition you create should be at least 25 GB in size, so there’s enough room for the OS and anything extra that might end up there, like files or applications. Next, click Partition.
4. Once your drive is partitioned, it’s time to install Windows. Again, the Windows 8 preview needs to be burned to a disc in order to install. Boot Camp should detect the disc once it’s inserted and allow you to continue installing. Click Start Installation. Your computer will now restart and boot from the Windows disc.
5. Follow the instructions on screen. When the installer asks you where to install Windows, select “Disk 0 Partition 3 BOOTCAMP” and then click Drive options (advanced). Choose Format from the options that appear to format the partition to NTFS, the file system Windows requires.
6. Follow the onscreen instructions again. Once Windows has installed, your Mac will automatically restart into Windows.

Since the Boot Camp support software for Windows won’t work with the developer preview, you won’t be able to install the Boot Camp tools on Windows. That means that to boot back into your OS X partition, you’ll need to restart your Mac with the Option key on the keyboard held down. You’ll be shown a list of available startup drives, from which you can choose your main partition where OS X is housed.

Remember this is a developer preview version of Windows 8. That is, it’s essentially alpha software, so things could go very wrong when you use it. Just as Apple suggests when using developer previews of OS X, you might not want to install Windows 8 on your main computer, and make sure to back up before you do any installations.

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You get a new Mac and even though you know you should, you don’t want to start over from scratch and reload the whole system. To make matters worse, you have Boot Camp installed and really don’t want to start over on the Windows side. So, here’s how you can image both OS’s to a new machine using free tools.

You need to download the Carbon Copy Cloner and Winclone software packages. CCC was created by Mike Bombich and has been used for years to clone Mac machines. It is the standard tool for this job. Winclone is made by Twocanoes Software and this is what we will use to image the Windows Boot Camp partition.

Let’s Get Started

Lets start off with Winclone first. After you install the app and run it for the first time, it will tell you it needs to download and install NTFSProgs. Click the download button and install NTFSProgs by following the wizard. The NTFSProgs software allows Winclone to properly read NTFS formatted partitions.

Now run Winclone again and select your Boot Camp partition in the Source dropdown. You can write some notes in the Item Description field if you’d like. When you’re ready, click the Image… button.

It will prompt you for a name and location to save the image to.

Now we wait for Winclone to do its work. When it’s completed, this dialog box will appear. You can now quit Winclone.

Carbon Copy Cloner is a little different in that it can image from your old machine to your new one using a Firewire or network connection. For this tutorial we’ll use the Firewire method. Setup your new machine and connect a Firewire cable between the two Macs. On the new Mac, hit the power button and hold down the “T” key on the keyboard until you see the Firewire symbol on the screen. This boots it into Target Disk Mode where it will act as if it’s just an external Firewire hard drive. On your old Mac we need to launch Carbon Copy Cloner. Your Source Disk drive is your local drive and the Target Disk is the Firewire drive. Click the Clone button and off we go.

After CCC is finished, reboot the new Mac and it should be identical to the original. From here on out, we are done with the old machine. When we imaged the Mac partition, we also brought along the Winclone image with it so now we can restore that image on our new Mac. Launch the Boot Camp Assistant in the utilities folder to create a new Windows partition.

Launch Winclone and click on the Restore tab. Click the Select Image button and browse to your Windows image. Mine was in the Documents folder.

Restore it to your newly created Boot Camp partition.

You know have a new Mac that’s a complete clone of your old one, Boot Camp and all. Windows will probably complain, as it always does, about drivers. Just insert your OS X DVD while in Windows and let it re-install the Boot Camp drivers for you. Of course, starting over from scratch is cleaner but sometimes you just don’t have the time. Proper cloning offers a reasonably quick solution.

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For 90 percent of my daily toil, OS X is the best platform for me. I use it during my day job, freelance writing, school, graphic design, and the usual goofing off everyone does. However, there is one glaring desire missing: I play Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs), and the Mac-native offerings are slim. I’ve had to result to running games in emulators, virtual disks, and Boot Camp partitions, and after running some numbers I thought I’d share my findings with you.

The Games

I play the following MMOs: World of Warcraft, EverQuest 1 and 2, Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons and Dragons Online. Of these, only WoW and Warhammer have native clients. Which means I’m forced to use some sort of emulation to play them. A commenter  on Liam’s Windows 7 piece said, “You bought an Apple computer so use the Apple software. If you want it so bad go buy a PC.” For me, Apple and OS X are fantastic for my productivity needs, but when it comes to gaming, sadly, it’s still a Windows world.

The Emulators

Fortunately, all is not lost. Once Apple went to Intel chips, running Windows in some sort of emulation became possible. For a gamer like myself, it became a saving grace that let me enjoy OS X for my daily usage, but lets me have my games and play them, too. For the purposes of testing, I played games in the following programs:

• CrossOver Games 8.1.3. CrossOver is a Wine-based emulator, so you’re not actually running any Windows code; it’s all handled via the app.
• Parallels Desktop 4 version 4.0.3848 with a Windows 7 virtual,
• Windows 7 running in Boot Camp on OS 10.6.2. Unfortunately, Parallels can only access a Boot Camp partition officially supported by Apple, so I was unable to test Parallels directly accessing Boot Camp.

These were all tested on a 2.26 GHz 13″ MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and at native 1280×800 resolution.

The Results

Costs
For Boot Camp, Windows 7 Home Professional is $199.99. CrossOver Games is $39.99.  Parallels is easily the most expensive. Windows 7 Home Professional is $199.99 and Parallels is $79.99.

Setting Things Up

Boot Camp: This is the easy one. Since Boot Coomp runs Windows natively, installing all the games tested was very easy — albeit time consuming since they each had to be downloaded off the net.

Parallels: Again, very straight forward. The process takes a little longer since it’s running in a virtual environment, and Parallels needs to install the Parallels Tools after the setup. I had no issues installing the games. Really, for all intents and purposes Parallels is just like running Windows.

CrossOver: Well, the install is quick — you just install CrossOver like any OS X program. Getting the games to run…well, that’s a different story. While there’s a decent compatibility listing on Codeweaver’s site, since CrossOver is a Wine emulator results are very mixed. If an app has a Gold rating from Codeweaver, it’ll install and run well. Unfortunately, none of the games I tested received Gold ratings so installation was challenging. With DDO and Lord of the Rings, the actual installer won’t work; you’ll have to download the full client off a third-party site. After that, a program called Pylotro is required to launch the game — it’s a custom front end someone wrote to handle the launcher duties. There’s no guarantee an installed game will keep working, either; a previously working EQ2 broke in a patch of CrossOver.

Load Times

Frankly, the load times were the biggest source of agony during my tests. Not because of the load times, but because the results were hard to sort out because of a lot of variables. Every game is an online-based game, so, to get my character in the game I had to pass an authentication server, several load screens and a character select. Therefore, Internet latency and a whole host of issues come to play.

Here’s how I got the numbers. I loaded all the games and timed from when I started and stopped when I was able to control my character in-world. With Parallels and Boot Camp I also added the boot times of the required OS to the chart. I did this three times and averaged the results.

I did notice an odd thing in Parallels: if I rebooted my Mac, the load times for both the OS and the game were significantly longer. However, after further testing I noticed that if I loaded Parallels/Windows 7 and immediately launched a game, the load results were almost double the value above. If I let the OS “sit” for a few, the load times were normal. Rather than report those numbers, I’ll just say this: a watched OS never loads — go get your beverage and snacks while Parallels loads and by the time you’re done the game will load faster.

In-Game Performance

Boot Camp: Unsurprisingly, the performance here was the best. At high I was getting around 40 FPS, and the game just flew. No issues.

Parallels: I’m actually amazed gaming performance under Parallels was decent. With graphics settings on High (but shadows turned off) I was getting around 20 FPS average. Turning down options like view distances got the FPS closer to 30. I noticed no major issues outside of a slight stutter when loading a crowded area. Both windowed mode and full-screen worked fine. As an added bonus, you can set Parallels to share your OS X and Windows home directories, so any screenshots I took went right into my OS X Documents folder for easy viewing.

CrossOver: The performance was about half-way between Parallels and Boot Camp. I was getting just over 30 FPS in the games. There were, however, some significant trade-offs. Neither DDO or LotRO handle windowed mode well — once the window loses focus, you can’t click inside the window when you get back to it. Also, there’s a big issue with LotRO where the screen will go black forcing a reboot. I was able to get around both issues by forcing the virtual to run in a window. The game would think it’s full screen, but the OS treated it as a window. This way I could have access to Skype and if LotRO crashed it didn’t take the entire OS down with it. As I mentioned earlier, a previously working EverQuest 2 install broke with a recent patch release of CrossOver.

Conclusions

I used to be a huge fan of CrossOver due to its overall speed and low footprint. However, I’ve had enough and will be deleting the files. The final straw was EverQuest 2 breaking. While it’s cheap, getting a lot of games running is a gigantic hassle and there’s no guarantee they’ll keep working. As an aside, the community on the official forums is very helpful, and just about every issue someone’s had is at least addressed, even if there’s no solution.

For now, I’m running my games in Parallels. While the performance isn’t as great as in Boot Camp, the convenience of not needing to reboot is a big bonus for me. Often, I’ll game when taking a break from a project and I’d like to not have to reboot. As an added bonus, it’s very easy to resize the virtual disk in Parallels. It took less than 5 minutes to add another 32GB to the virtual disk (in Boot Camp, I’d have to repartition and reformat). I’m really surprised at how well these games ran in Parallels. Version 5 claims to add better support for Shader Model 3, so I’m planning on upgrading.

I’m not deleting the Boot Camp partition, though. Once Apple releases official support for Windows 7, I plan on re-paritioning it to a 100GB partition and have Parallels access that directly. That’ll cover me for the best of both worlds: for every day gaming, I can load Parallels, but if I need it, I can reboot and use the same install files in Boot Camp.

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I have a confession to make. I don’t dual boot. I don’t use Windows on my Mac. I don’t need to. There’s not a single bit of software I need that is Windows-only. And even though I have Office:Mac 2008, I open Word and Excel documents in Pages and Numbers. (I don’t hate Office, I just find iWork to be a more rewarding experience!)

But, apparently, I’m in a minority, and every other Mac owner on Earth is simply aching to run Windows 7 on their Apple hardware. Well, you’d be forgiven for thinking as much, given the articles doing the rounds on tech sites this past weekend, most of them tersely reporting how Apple has missed its own deadline for providing official Boot Camp driver support for Microsoft’s latest version of Windows.

Here’s what Apple had to say in a (very short) support note published in October last year:

Apple will support Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate) with Boot Camp in Mac OS X Snow Leopard before the end of the year. This support will require a software update to Boot Camp.

The rest of the note was just a list of the nine older models of iMac and MacBook that wouldn’t support the Boot Camp update.

AppleInsider reached out to Apple for comment last week, as 2009 drew to a close. An Apple employee responsible for dealing with Bootcamp enquiries told them:

…it was very unlikely that the update would surface in the next 24 hours, adding that a release sometime early next year would be a safer bet.

MacWorld UK writes a little more dramatically about the missed deadline:

On the same day in October that rival Microsoft launched Windows 7 , Apple promised that it would revise Boot Camp… Apple has still not released a Boot Camp revision to its Software Update service.

Although Microsoft officially unveiled Windows 7 in late October, the company first provided developers with early builds a year before that, and began offering previews to the general public in February 2009.

Apple did not elaborate on why they would not support Microsoft’s newest operating system.

I’m not sure a missed deadline is the same as Apple demonstrating they unequivocally ‘would not’ support Windows 7, but the drama doesn’t end there. Here’s Paul Thurrott’s take, from a blog post entitled “Shame on Apple for not Providing Windows 7 Drivers by Now”:

Previously, Apple promised to provide Windows 7 drivers through its Boot Camp utility […] by the end of 2009. So they’re late. But these drivers can and should have been delivered to customers when Windows 7 shipped, in October. I guess the company was too busy fixing a widely-reported user data deletion issue in Snow Leopard to bother supporting a competing system that just works.

So thanks for nothing Apple. We know you’re scared of Windows 7, but come on.

I might offer a less florid possibility; could it possibly be just a delay? Y’know, like Microsoft experienced when it delayed the release of Windows 95. And Windows 98. And Windows… oh, you get the point. Look, software delays happen and they don’t have to mean anything!

Thurrott’s Apple-fan-baiting aside, I have a serious question; am I so completely out of touch that I’m the only Mac user in the world who doesn’t dual boot? OK, I played with some virtualization tools a while back out of sheer curiosity, and the half-hearted belief that I really might need Microsoft Office (note: I didn’t) but it wasn’t long before they were removed.

A Tad Silly

Mac OS X, iLife and iWork have most my bases covered for personal creativity and productivity. And while I do a lot of online collaboration with a wide circle of colleagues and friends, most of whom are on Windows machines, I’m not exaggerating when I say — it’s simply not an issue. Honestly, there isn’t a single thing I’ve come across in 18 months that absolutely demanded I use Windows.

But apparently, that’s unusual, and most Mac owners in the world not only use Windows, they need Windows and, more than any other version, they absolutely must have Windows 7, so Apple’s missed deadline is nothing short of scandalous.

True? Because if that’s not true, all of that breathless reporting over the weekend about missed deadlines and Apple’s ‘fears’ would prove a tad silly, wouldn’t it?

Actually, I have had one issue since switching to the Mac; my friends don’t use iChat. They’re stuck with Skype or — horror of horrors –Windows Live Messenger for video conferencing and collaboration. I pity them. It’s the one thing I wish Apple would release for Windows. The world would be a better place then, I’m sure.

So, tell me, Mac Majority, is Boot Camp’s (temporarily) absent Windows 7 support really the Big Deal the tech press have made it out to be? Am I truly in some peculiar Mac Minority who don’t install Windows on their Apple hardware? Am I, in fact, missing a far bigger point? Please enlighten me.

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I’m getting a copy (might pick up a burger, too), but for me it’s a legitimate business expense, so the decision, even without an upgrade path (I’ve just been using the Windows 7 RC on my iMac, and don’t have an existing retail license), it makes financial sense for me to have access to a Windows machine. Maybe you’re in the same boat.

The question isn’t really whether Mac users are also Windows users, since recent research on the subject seems to indicate that yes, there is in fact plenty of crossover. I’m wondering whether it might be the case that Apple fans not only buy Windows, but that we might also represent a big chunk of the early adopter crowd for this new incarnation.

Everyone I know who is buying a copy of Windows 7, upgrade or otherwise, uses a Mac. It may not be their primary machine (yes, that does actually happen), but they have one nonetheless. Most of those people are planning on installing Windows 7 on a boot camp partition or a virtualized PC using Parallels or VMware Fusion.

I know you’re thinking that I probably surround myself with like-minded people, and as a result have a lot of Mac-using friends, but that isn’t the case. The majority of people I know are exclusively PC users, and not a single one that I’ve talked to plans on upgrading today, or even in the near future.

As Mac users, we have a tendency to also be gadget addicts. I’ve found we’re more interested in all tech, not just our own, perhaps because we consider ourselves connoisseurs in the area thanks to our impeccable taste. For me, and for many others that I know, that interest translates into a pretty heady case of gadget-lust, one of the symptoms of which is early-adopterese. And also a willingness to acknowledge when a company besides our beloved Apple releases a smart, well-designed product.

Fact is, Windows 7 is a huge improvement on its predecessor. I say that as someone who’s been using preview versions since the first beta was released. It’s not Snow Leopard, don’t get me wrong, but that won’t stop me from being among the first to jump on board. Anyone else making that jump today? If you are, what are your reasons? Do you consider yourself an early adopter with tech in general?

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Snow Leopard is starting to settle down into a relatively stable piece of software that will likely resemble the final release version, according to Engadget. Some speculate that it could receive retail release alongside iPhone OS 3.0 as soon as WWDC, which takes place in early June.

Like iPhone OS 3.0, Apple is now giving developers the go-ahead to develop Snow Leopard-specific apps without fear of major feature changes or revisions, since they just announced that the operating system’s APIs are now frozen. That should also mean that the feature list we’re seeing reported now from devs with access to the Snow Leopard beta is an accurate representation of what the new OS will ship with.

Some of the highly popularized features of Snow Leopard are the inclusion of QuickTime X, the long awaited update to the resident OS X media player software that will finally take it beyond version 7.xx. Another recent addition is Chinese character handwriting input recognition, a feature it borrows from its portable cousin, and a finished version of the Grand Central architecture, which lets devs use multiple processor cores without necessarily having the advanced programming knowledge usually required.

MacRumors points out yet another new feature they’ve spotted, which is the ability to access HFS+ formatted drives in Windows using drivers built into the new version of Boot Camp that will ship with Snow Leopard. The only people not pleased about that are probably the developers of MacDrive, a third-party Windows program which currently allows you to do the very same thing, but for a price. So long as Apple includes drivers for accessing NTFS drives in OS X, the circle will finally be complete.

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I’m not ashamed to admit it. I run XP on my aluminum iMac. My girlfriend is ashamed of me and my brother won’t speak to me. All because of a 40gb hard drive partition and a start button.

I did it mostly so that I could play City of Heroes again (look what you’ve made me do, NCSoft! Release a Mac version already). I also like Corel’s PaintShop Pro Photo XII for quick and dirty photo editing, as I find it doesn’t require as much attention or time as Photoshop for minor changes.

Regardless of whether you agree/disagree with my reasons/excuses, there are a couple indispensable tips for those inclined to be-Windows their Macs the Boot Camp way.

1. Do it early. One thing I learned from numerous failed attempts to use Boot Camp on my MacBook is that Apple’s OS-switcher is not fond of world-weary, crudded up hard drives. For whatever reason (maybe because it was in my  pre-AppZapper days), Boot Camp would not partition my hard drive. With my iMac I did it immediately, and it went off without a hitch.
2. Bluetooth mouse switching sucks. In effect, installing OS X to a Boot Camp drive is like having a second computer. Which is great for some things (no sharing of system resources, for instance), but incredibly annoying for others. Like re-pairing Bluetooth mice every time you switch. Do yourself a favor and get a dedicated Windows wired or wireless mouse in addition to your BT one.
3. Make switching easier. The tray icon in Windows is easy enough to access, but going into Preferences and Startup Disk every time I want to switch in OS X is no fun.  As a workaround, I went to /System/Library/PreferencePanes and dragged  StartupDisc.prefpane to my dock (right side of the break only). This saves a couple steps at least, and my beloved sanity.
4. Read/Write to your Boot Camp drive. Kind of tricky, but indispensable. You may have come across this before, but this guide is definitely the best I’ve found out there. Proceed at your own risk, it’s not a perfect solution yet. But, it has saved me literally hours in file transfers.

Now, if you manage to get over the disapproving glares of your fellow Mac devotees, you’ll have a much more enjoyable Boot Camp experience.

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While you’re at it, don’t forget to pick up last week’s Boot Camp 1.4, which seemed to get lost in the hubbub of iLife ’08, iWork ’08, and the new iMacs.

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