Steps to Install Windows XP on a Macbook Pro

Apple’s Boot Camp Installation & Setup Guide (link opens in a new window).

Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard Install Disk.

One External Hard Drive to Backup Windows XP.

One Western Digital 1 TB External Hard Drive to Backup Mac OS.

Preparationįirst, let’s get our stuff in order to pull this off: This is the software that controls dual booting for the Mac. Apple’s Boot CampĪpple’s Boot Camp is a free utility that comes with the Macbook Pro and is located in the Utilities folder. I’ve used both VMware and Parallels and they both work great. But check it out if you don’t want to plunk down $80.00 or so for one of the other two solutions. I have not used Virtual Box so I won’t talk about it in this article. You can also use the freely available Virtual Box software as well. Parallels for Mac ($79.99) (not an affiliate link) – You can download a free trial. VMware for Mac ($79.99) (not an affiliate link) – You can download a free trial.

As a side note, I have set this up for two people who are more experienced Mac users and they totally understand the VM concept. With that said, here are two products you could buy if you want to setup Windows as a VM under Mac OS X. In review then, a VM allows you to run two operating systems at once, and a dual-boot setup allows you to run one OS at a time. Some folks have a hard time understanding the VM concept and it becomes a bit more confusing to them. The person only needs to use one application that requires Windows XP, so when he’s done using that application, he can reboot the machine into the Mac OS.įor some people, this is simpler. However, because the person who will be using this setup is a novice computer user, we’re going to setup Windows XP as a dual-boot setup. This allows you to use both operating systems at the same time. So you would fire up your Mac, and start a VM that would run Windows XP at the same time. More specifically, you can run Windows XP in a window on the Mac OS as it’s running. In this case we’ll be running Mac OS X and Windows XP.

VMs allow you to run two operating systems on one machine. Virtual Machines or VMs as they’re known are great. The person who will be using this is NOT an experienced computer person and is the only person who will be using his Macbook Pro. It’s got a 500 GB hard drive, so there’s a plenty of space to run two Operating Systems. I’ve got a Macbook Pro that’s freakin’ cool and was purchased in January 2011. But for this story, I’m using Windows XP. You can also run Windows 7 on a Macbook Pro too. Yes, you can run Windows XP on a Macbook Pro. Here’s my experience, why I did it and what you can expect when doing something like this. I recently installed Windows XP on a Macbook Pro running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.6.

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