We’re all Mac in-house but when you’re working in the world of software, if you’re doing anything web or World of Warcraft-related, you definitely need to test against Windows occasionally.

On the web side of things, Internet Explorer, while having the largest market share of any web browser, is also the most eccentric of web browsers when it comes to its interpretation of standards. And unfortunately, even the fact that you’re programming in LUA under World of Warcraft doesn’t mean that you won’t encounter problems related to the underlying OS.

For example, Mike has an add-on for World of Warcraft that supports his web site Epic Mount, for WoW guilds. The add-on is working fine under MacOS X but as of this week’s 2.1 update to WoW, is crashing randomly on Windows machines. Not having a Windows machine handy to test it with is a problem.

I used to use Windows all the time, until my Thinkpad caught on fire and Mike’s gentle pestering of “get a mac!” finally won out. I haven’t regretted the switch at all; I have a much better user experience using my Mac, and I have Unix under the hood for the software work I want to do, so no more fidgety hassles trying to get Perl or MySQL to work under Windows. As time goes by, though, my Windows-fu becomes weaker.

We do run Windows under MacOS X on our Intel Macs, via a nifty piece of software called “Parallels Desktop”. Parallels uses the Intel CPU’s native “virtualization” support to trick Windows into thinking it has the machine to itself. There’s very little performance penalty for most operations, but rather than talk directly to the hardware, hardware access has to be emulated. That means that rather than talk to the ethernet card directly, Windows talks to Parallels, which pretends (in software) to be the ethernet card, and makes shared access to the actual ethernet card work. This adds a lot of overhead to hardware accesses. Perhaps the worst issue here is video display card access… Parallels has to pretend (in software again) to be a video card. World of Warcraft has relatively stringent video card requirements; it requires hefty 3D acceleration support to run in even the most minimal mode. Parallels doesn’t yet offer that level of support. Which means, unfortunately, that while the Parallels solution is fine for testing against Internet Explorer under Windows, it won’t help us with testing with World of Warcraft.

There is another hope. Apple has provided a piece of beta software called Boot Camp which is supposed to be built into Leopard (MacOS X 10.5, now due out in October) which assists in installing and running Windows on an Intel Macintosh. Boot Camp will repartition your Macintosh’s hard drive, create a CDROM with Windows drivers for your Mac hardware, and help load Windows onto your machine. In theory.

Remember, it’s beta.

So here goes:

1. Use Boot Camp to install Windows XP on Mike’s MacBook Pro. Mike has about 60GB free, which is plenty of space.
2. Boot Camp complains that there’s not enough space to move certain files it needs to move.
3. Poke around at this for a while. Google and find a reference to use Disk Utility to clear free disk space solving the problem. This is going to take a while, so give up.
4. Try installing Windows using Boot Camp on a 17″ iMac that we don’t use very often.
5. Boot Camp successfully partitions the hard drive.
6. Boot Camp asks me to load my Windows XP CDROM but then doesn’t recognize it (more on this later).
7. Try booting directly from the XP CDROM and installing XP the old-fashioned way.
8. XP Boots and installs itself with only a little urging on my part.
9. XP crashes when it reboots.
10. Reboot manually and I am now running XP on my Mac.
11. However, there are no drivers so it doesn’t know how to use the network (among other things).
12. Try to make a Boot Camp drivers CDROM on my MacBook Pro.
13. Boot Camp refuses to do this because I don’t have enough disk space to parition my hard drive for Windows.
14. Locate Boot Camp, use “Show Package Contents” using the Finder, find “DiskImage.dmg” under the Resources folder and copy its contents to a USB flash drive.
15. Plug the USB flash drive into the iMac and get errors while trying to copy files from it.
16. Go back to the disk image under Boot Camp and burn it to a CDROM instead.
17. Insert the CDROM in the iMac and get an error saying it needs a newer version of the Microsoft Windows Installer program.
18. Realize that the fact that Boot Camp says it wants XP SP2 and I’ve got XP SP1 (which is why it didn’t like my CDROM earlier) and decide to remedy the situation by downloading SP2.
19. Download the standalone version of SP2 (since networking isn’t working yet) and try to install it.
20. Windows XP SP2 says there’s insufficient disk space available and that it needs another 4MB. The system has roughly 19GB of free disk space on the Windows partition.
21. No joy doing a quick search for how to get around this error. No joy on guessing at possible command-line options to override this check. Try another tact.
22. I try to download updates to the Microsoft Installer from Microsoft’s web site, but they’re only available to customers who have validated their computer with Windows Genuine Advantage, which of course is impossible on my Mac.
23. Take a look at Dell’s web site for cheap, WoW-capable machines.
24. It’s Thursday before Memorial Day weekend and there’s no way a new machine from Dell would be here before a week was up… and Mike would really like to solve this problem now.
25. Try downloading the updates from a copy of IE7 running under a Windows Genuine Advantage-certified copy of Windows.
26. IE7 just crashed.
27. Restart IE7 and try the download again.
28. IE7 crashed again.
29. Restart Windows.
30. Windows needs to check its filesystem.
31. Windows is deleting lots of files as part of its filesystem check.
32. Windows’ filesystem check seems to have deleted much of IE7 (seriously, I am not making this up).
33. Checking Best Buy’s web site to see what kind of cheapo crap machines they may have available.
34. Remind myself that not only do we not need an extra computer lying around but why do I want to give more money to a company that treats me like a criminal when I try to use software that I’ve already paid for?
35. Try to download the Windows installer updates from another Windows installation.
36. This time I get the files.
37. I install them on the iMac and try again to install the Apple drivers CD.
38. No joy, it’s too clever and knows that I still don’t have SP2. Which is probably for the best as it probably depends on SP2 features that aren’t present on SP1.
39. Remember that we have a copy of Windows Vista that Microsoft sent me for free… wonder where it is… locate it… let’s try installing Windows again.
40. Boot Camp or no Boot Camp? I’m not sure how Boot Camp will deal with already having a Windows partition present. Rather than find out, I’m going to install Vista from Windows XP.
41. So far so good.
42. Spoke too soon, Windows XP crashed while trying to reboot into Vista.
43. Manual reboot, Vista starts okay and continues with its installation.
44. Every time Vista reboots during the installation process (which is several times) it ends up back in MacOS X. I could fix this by changing the “Startup Disk” in System Preferences but each time it happens I think it will be the last time. I’m wrong.
45. Vista has installed itself! I install the Apple drivers, which works flawlessly.
46. Vista downloads 23 updates and installs them.
47. After another reboot, I start installing World of Warcraft and the Burning Crusade expansion pack. Warcraft will probably need to download about 800MB of updates once it’s done, but hey, that’s life.

This gives us 30 days of Vista (it was already activated on another machine), which should take care of our current needs. If we need we can “re-arm” the evaluation period up to extend our pre-activation use to a maximum of 120 days using this guide. But we should be settled on a longer-term strategy of how to deal with Windows by then.

The primary lesson here is to pay attention to the requirements of the software you’re using. Boot Camp made it clear that it wanted XP SP2. I have a pile of legal copies of XP from old Windows machines whose carcasses litter the hallways here. Unfortunately, none of them are XP SP2. If I had started with XP SP2 or Vista, I have no doubt that the whole process would have gone much more smoothly.

By the way, Vista is kinda purty.

[tags]macintosh, intel macintosh, windows, windows xp, windows vista, boot camp, apple, parallels, world of warcraft, epic mount, windows genuine advantage[/tags]

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