I wanted to play on the Mac and ended up downloading the Windows 7 RC from Microsoft. The question was whether you could install it with BootCamp, I found out that you could here.

The most important things to do before starting are:

  1. Find the installation discs for Mac OS X
  2. Make a backup of the system
  3. Print the BootCamp instructions

The Mac OS X discs are needed for the driver installation. Backup is always good and Time Machine helps. The BootCamp instructions have about 20 pages, but you can print 4 pages per sheet and save some trees.

Once done, just follow the instructions. In my case, everything went well, but some moments of faith were necessary. After copying the files, Windows decides to boot for the first time. I received a message to give the boot from the CD, but it’s enough to ignore that the Windows HD is initialized.

After that, he asks to update and restarts again for the second time.

The Wi-Fi and network returned working without problems, but the microphone was silent.

Bootcamp drivers are on Mac OS X disk 1. Run setup.exe.

I had an error message at this point, error 2229. If you encounter this with you, copy the disk 1 to a Windows folder. Download a program called Orca.

It’s an editor for .msi file. Error 2229 occurs because the installer refuses the version of Windows 7. After installing orca, open bootcamp.msi that you copied from the original Mac OS X CD. It will display a list on the right with several options, choose “Launch Condition Table” and with the right button “Drop table”. Save bootcamp.msi and run setup.exe that you copied from the CD. Now BootCamp should install without problems, except for the warnings of Windows 7 about incompatibility, etc.

Everything works well after BootCamp is installed, but with some problems. I was able to get sound and even make the camera work. The microphone works, although it does not appear on Skype, for example. New drivers for the video card can be run through Windows Update using IE8. Even managed to play with this new installation. Outside of that, even volume overlays, brightness and eject key work well. The alt graphics on my wonderful Belgian keyboard do not work, but the other keys do.

Remember that the Windows 7 RC only works until March 2010. Since I’ll only use it to test and play, there’s no problem. After you can install the Windows 7 that buy or simply delete the partition using also BootCamp.

On Apple’s site, BootCamp 2.1 (BCUpdateVista32) is available but I couldn’t make it work.

To register, I installed using OS X 10.5.7. When giving the boot, press Alt to choose enter Mac OS or Windows 7. Opening system preferences, disk startup you can configure which of the two systems will be default.

Update: To install BootCamp 2.1, follow the instructions of this post here. Just open regedit, find Bootcamp services in the registry and change Language to 0x409! More details on the post.