After editing wedding photos, I went into the next project...installing Windows 7. After arming myself with loads of knowledge on doing the documented double install I proceeded. Then I hit the first snag. Apparently defragmentation happens on Macs as well and is one of the main causes for Boot Camp not being able to allocate space for the Windows partition. An hour later of searching, there were two solutions and it is one of those classic time-versus-money tradeoff. One is to fork out about $30+ for a defrag program on a Mac (yes, they don't have defrag programs. Normally not needed but is needed for dual boots) and the other is to boot from the Snow Leopard DVD and "reinstall" the OS. Obviously I chose the latter and an hour later, it's fixed.
So the partition has been done and started the Windows installation. 1.5 hours later, all is looking peachy when I hit the second snag. Windows doesn't seem to like running the installation for the drivers needed on some Mac devices and keyboard mappings. A Google Chrome download and half an hour later of researching, managed to fix it and now moving on to the most critical part of the process, the second install. Crossing my fingers while running the second install and another hour later everything seems to be working just fine. No weird messages or anything yet but I'm still going to keep an eye on my Windows account for the next month or so just to be sure that I am in the clear.
I feel such a geek yet at the same time it feels oddly satisfying that you are confronted with a complex computer problem and manage to solve it. Probably the next geekiest thing to do now is to get a second computer by building it from scratch. But for now, everything is looking good. Will probably try to install the games that I've bought later when I finish downloading the driver updates, windows updates and a few more other things.
Windows 7 is pretty so now I have two pretty OSs to use. Yummy. Probably might try to do a triple boot system if I need to use Linux-specific stuff in uni.
Next project: Daylesford day trip, the almost-ages-ago Tasmania trip and probabilistic modeling project.
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Wow, didn't know it's such a hassle installing Windows 7 on a Mac. Didn't have that trouble with Ubuntu 9.10. I'm gonna get a new desktop, will try to build it from scratch. I guess the only concern is putting together the processor since everything else is packed. Will tell you how it goes, lol.