This weekend, I thought I would install Windows 7 on my Mac’s Boot Camp partition and give it a quick try. I’ve really liked using WindowsXP (pretty much only for gaming, and I’ll explain why), so I hoped that Windows 7 would give me similar experience. I decided that the best route would be to erase the XP partition and start over from scratch.

The installation of Windows 7 went without a hitch. I had no troubles at all getting it up and running. Once in Windows, I was quite pleased with how responsive it seemed. Windows would open and close really quickly, applications seemed to launch and run really fast. I was having a grand old time… then I decided to start installing games.

I started out with my favorite addiction, World of Warcraft. I Installed the main WoW application and then did the install for the Burning Crusade. Now, if you are familiar with this game, you know that it does take quite a while to get it installed. It’s quite a few gigabytes of data to get on there, so I’m guessing that the install took around an hour and a half. After that was done, I launched the game, knowing that we were about to enter endless cycles of installing patches to the game for the next few hours. Well, to my surprise, World of Warcraft informed me that due to some change in the OS, it needed to move the game to a different section of the drive so as not to cause problems with updates. Well… okay… except, it decided it was going to move everything by re-downloading it all from the internet!? I gave it about 15-20 minutes and said “enough”. I’ll play it on my Mac partition. Let’s try something different.

NASCAR SimRacing… that’s another of my favs. Let’s install. No problems doing the install at all. I’m getting excited to try this out, then… crash. Windows 7 said something about changing the application space to compatibility mode, so I did, re-launched the game and… crash. Sigh. 2 for 2. Do I want to try this again? Not really.

I like to game. I love my Mac. I compromise by running Windows on my Mac to get a great selection of games and better game performance. On my Mac Mini, Windows will take advantage of twice the video memory that Mac OS will, giving a much richer gaming environment… especially in World of Warcraft. I can probably troubleshoot all this junk and figure out what’s wrong and why nothing is working right, but my Windows 7 will expire eventually, need to be replaced with a fully-liscensed version and everything will probably need to be re-installed as well.

Windows 7 seems like a very nice and polished Operating System, one that I would love to consider as my second OS for gaming, if only it worked for that. Right now, it doesn’t seem like it’s the one for me. Yet.