So I’ve been asking around bounced back and forth between a bunch of live chat support and I haven’t really gotten a straightforward answer. Would Apple’s current Macbook Airs be capable of running Windows 7 at the bare metal without any issues? I know Microsoft has disabled support for Windows 7 on some Intel processors, but I don’t know which ones are supported vs which aren’t.
What year of macbook do you have?
Mac’s can run Windows, though on a macbook air that might be a bit daft. You can do so with the bootcamp utility in your utility folder. You can do it on a USB or on a disk if your machine has a CD drive.
It’s the ones currently on their site. I don’t have one.
Yeah ok. Yeah you can run whatever on them. You have to use the BootCamp app in the utilities folder of the machine. Why would you want to run windows though?
Are you sure about that though? Microsoft has disabled Windows 7 for some Intel processors
Apple doesn’t have the 7000 series intel chips in anything yet. They just got skylake. You’re good.
I haven’t read anything good about power optimization running Windows on a MacBook of any kind. So from that perspective it really wouldn’t be worth it, since you’d be getting probably half of the battery time under windows you would have under OSX.
If you’re spending the tag on a MacBook Air just to run Windows on it, you’d probably be better off looking into other options. But if you’re more looking into running Windows on the side, it’d probably be worth getting something with extra ram and run Windows in a VM.
He has other options. He can use Parallels and run a VM with 1:1 performance, or he can use Wine and have a lot of native performance ties with that.