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[Closed] Anyone running Win 7/8 on a Mac Mini

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Missus and little Breathe wants a new PC for work/homework etc. so just debating the pros and cons (and prices of a nice fanless one...). Probably Win10 it as well.

I've got a fairly entry level Mac Mini (albeit with 8Gb RAM) that I don't have much chance to play on these days so just wondering if I can dual boot it.

Anyone had experience/tried it? In theory it should still be way faster than the current dinosaur of a PC. Just trying to work out if there's any gotchas to it, apart from the obvious overhead on the HDD of having two operating systems sitting there...


 
Posted : 02/06/2015 1:32 pm
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Yup I run Windows on a Mac Mini with 16gb Ram as my main work computer. I use Parallels and it works fine even when I have both operating systems running at the same time and are jumping back and forth between the two.

Dual boot would be better as you are not then running 2 systems at the same time.

Off the top of my head I can't see any issues


 
Posted : 02/06/2015 1:52 pm
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Have a search of macrumors.com threads on the Mini. I think you should be fine my 2009 Mini now with 8gb ram runs fine and although I don't run Windows the machine has more than enough horsepower to do so IMO.


 
Posted : 02/06/2015 1:55 pm
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I run VMware fusion with a Windows 7 VM on a Macbook Air with 8gb of memory. No problems to report.


 
Posted : 02/06/2015 2:43 pm
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Cool. Cheers for the comments. Looks like play time tonight...


 
Posted : 02/06/2015 3:50 pm
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Posting from a Macbook Air booted into Windows 8.1. All works fine. Stick with what's supported under Boot Camp though (so no Win10 yet) and you have all the driver support for everything to work nicely.


 
Posted : 02/06/2015 3:59 pm
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Bootcamp works fine if you need native performance.

Paralllels / Fusion pretty damn close for most tasks but if they play games the HD graphics need all the help they can get so Bootcamp it.


 
Posted : 03/06/2015 12:49 pm