The Mindful Coder

I finally installed Window 7 via bootcamp after trying it out as a VM on my MacBook Pro for a month.

First of course I had to get around theridiculous restriction placed by Apple that bootcamp can be used only if the primary HDD is unpartitioned and is a single logical drive. WTF? How retarded is that? I tried to get clever by partitioning the mac primary partition *after* creating a bootcamp partition and installing Windows. If you do that, bootcamp stops recognizing your Windows partition. Messed up and idiotic but it’s not like Apple is known for listening to users. Anyway, I digress.

So, after I got on Win 7 via bootcamp, my Dell external display wouldn’t work. If I unplugged and plugged it back in via the mini display port, it would get recognized but try as I might, it would not allow me to duplicate or extend my display to the external monitor.

I guessed this was an issue with the nvidia drivers (nvidia GEForce 9600M GT). To fix the issue, download the latest Vista 64bit drivers from nvidia here.

Works just fine after a restart. If your monitor is not recognized even after a restart, unplug and plug it back into the mini-display port.

Note that this fix is for Win7 64bit. I don’t know if the same issue exists for Win7 x86. I would be interested in hearing back from you guys if you found the same issue on Win7 x86 or Vista.

I use Google Chrome in a peculiar way. I prefer Firefox for browsing on Windows because of some add-ons I cannot live without. But I have found Google Chrome perfect for debugging on the Flex/Papervision3d project that I am currently working on – primarily because of it’s per-tab process, responsiveness and generally low overhead nature.

I decided to try out the Windows 7 beta and since I primarily work off my MacBook Pro, I installed the 64bit version on Fusion. Things went swimmingly except for Chrome which just wouldn’t work. I kept getting told off that Chrome “has known compatibility issues” and if I ignored those warnings, Chrome would scream bloody murder even if I touched it lightly.

Add the “–in-process-plugins” switch to the “Target” of the shortcut for Chrome as in the screenshot below.

[That is two dashes before the "in" --in]

You’ll still possibly get those annoying “Has known compatibility issues” warnings but you can choose to turn those off.

Hope this helps.