Behold the Wipple
Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 1:09PM A friend/client came to me with an interesting project.
He has four very young kids, and their computer is ... well, aging. We have been steadily upgrading his corporate computers, and he found himself with a surplus Mac Mini dual core with 2gb of RAM. Unfortunately, the kids' school is standardized on Windows.
Normally I don't take on home computers. But since this was my friend and one of my top customers, and he rarely asks me to be involved in personally owned computers (plus, it was interesting)... Why not?
Knowing that I've been using Windows 7 beta and RC since December of last year, he asked if it would be possible to load 7 on the Mac Mini. He did not want virtualization, did not want Boot Camp... just Windows 7.
Thanks to the unholy union of Windows and Apple, we have the name "Wipple".
To make a short story shorter, it was pretty easy. Here's a couple of things to take note of:
- Much of my encouragement came from here.
- Keep in mind that you will be completely blowing off any partitions that are present on the hard drive. Don't do this if you have information on the machine you want to keep.
- Once the OS was installed, networking just worked. It even picked up the wireless network immediately.
- The initial updates also included a new video card driver. Installing this broke Aero until I followed these directions.
- Install Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free, it works, it's about time.
- Since there is no eject button on the device, I also added this gadget.
Voila! All seems to be working well. There are a couple of driver incompatibilities - A USB device and an unknown device show up as yellow splotches in Device Manager. I suspect this is the internal BlueTooth gear, but I'm not sure. It is not enough to get in the way of a good kid's machine. Everything else - video, audio, network, etc - seem to be functioning perfectly. Windows 7 seems to be happy with the hardware arrangement. It's not setting any benchmark records - I think largely because of the 4200 rpm IDE drive - but it's plenty for the intended purpose.
Behold the Wipple. The wrongness of it all is both delicious and disturbing.
Chuck Colby
Something I just noticed, as I was setting up a blaring security hole auto-login for the kids...
Windows has parental controls? I guess I had never been exposed to that... Parental controls have been around in Windows since Vista. Since I don't normally do home computers... and since I have not yet allowed any of my clients to install Vista ... this came as a shock to me. Never mind that I've been running Windows 7 since December 2008.
To be fair, the controls are pretty basic. You can control the times your kids are using the computer, the ESRB rating of the games that they are allowed to play, the programs that they can run, and apparently the types of websites they are allowed to visit.
I still think it's a bit too basic to place much trust in. It's great for the time limits, if nothing else. At least until your 5th grader cracks your password.
Hacks and Mods, Windows in Hardware, Operating System, Software
Reader Comments (1)
That's awesome!... and so wrong. I gave my brother so much crap about getting a MacMini just to BootCamp XP until he started playing Assassin's Creed on it. LOL. I guess Mac does make good hardware.
As for Windows 7... I love it! I was using it for several months until I got to Cal Poly and found that Windows 7 can't connect to Cal Poly's network (stupid Cisco Clean Agent). Now I'm going straight Ubuntu and have never been happier with my software configuration.