Running OD on a MacBook Pro with Boot Camp

[MikeS3000]

So my old dell laptop is getting pretty old and starting to fail. I have been running OD with Windows based machines since 2008. Server is Windows Server 2003, Most workstations are XP Pro and one is Windows 7 Pro.

My question is, if I buy a new MacBook Pro for my office will I run into any issues using Boot Camp to boot Windows 7 Pro? To me it seems as if this should work because one is booting Windows natively and not virtually. Does anyone know if Boot Camp plays nice with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit edition? I am really intrigued by this setup because I like having the best of both worlds with OS X and Windows 7.

[babysilvertooth]

HI Mike,

I have been running OD on VMware Fusion under XP with my office a mix of XP and 2 Win7 machines. Running it with Fusion is nice because I can switch between them Mac and windows quickly. I only use OD and email on the windows side, and do everything else on the mac side. I have not had any problems. The nice think with Fusion is, I keep snapshots of the windows machines, so if it gets infected, or something weird goes on, I load the last snapshot. Since OD is based on the server, I never have loss of data (except emails but those are saved elsewhere as well).

The few extra bucks for Fusion (or parrells) is worth it. NOt having to re-start between the two OS's is nice. If you only use OD on the widows side, then your virtual machine doesn't have to be powerful.

Hope this helps.

[MikeS3000]

So let's say that I plan on spending most if not all of my time in Windows while at work and then mostly in OS X while at home, would Boot Camp save me some money and work alright?

[Dwayne]

That scenario seems like it would work well for you. I recommend setting the boot options to prompt for the OS you want, rather than booting to the last used.

[MikeS3000]

Excellent. That's what I wanted to hear. It's unfortunate that my Dental IT company (who is an authorized reseller of Open Dental) wrote me an email stating that they won't support me if I use a MacBook Pro because they have read posts on Dentaltown where dentists have had problems running Boot Camp. He said that they are not trained to support Macs and won't do it until more of their clients switch. It may be time to find a new, more progressive IT company. We'll see. From my understanding, all of the Macs are using the same hardware as any pc on the market so I don't understand why it would be so difficult to support a dual boot scenario. Things should be simple when you boot natively into Windows on a Mac. Who knows.

[Dwayne]

If you are in a native Windows environment, you should have no problem with support at Open Dental. However, we don't offer Mac hardware or software support either, so if there are networking issues or anything of that nature, we will most likely not be able to help. I have personally ran Open Dental on my Mac Book Pro with no issues.