I'm considering getting one of those new fancy Mac Book Pro's with the fancy screens, but after reading some stuff on the internets about running Windows 7 with bootcamp:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2770866?start=0&tstart=0
It seems you can't use the integrated graphics with windows, this causes windows to chew the battery life:
I am afraid it is not possible. Since Apple introduced dual graphics
chip laptops, they kept the low power/embedded GPU hidden under Window
and they expose only the power hungry discrete GPU.It feels that this is being done on purpose so that it appears to
users that OS X offers a better experience and battery life over
Windows.
So running bootcamp and windows kills the battery, running in parallels means you don't get accelerated 3d support (or something along those lines), so you don't get the performance out of it.
I'm wondering:
Is it possible to natively dual boot Windows 7 on a MBP, and if so would/does that give windows access to the integrated graphics to be able to not rape the battery?
Best Answer
By raping the battery do you mean getting almost 3 hours of Windows? In practical terms there isn't that much difference between running Windows and Mac on current gen MBP. I have been doing this for over a year with zero issues whatsoever. There is enough battery life to last an hour long commute twice with a few minutes of use in between. Put it this way, I went from from using Windows full time on the machine to using MacOS full time and didn't see any practical difference in usage.
What you want to do is install Windows using Bootcamp assistant, do not screw around with the partitions and install VMWare Fusion to use bootcamp partition. You can then have a choice of running Windows natively or running MacOs and being able to fire up the windows install in a VM if you need to do something quick in that. This makes your laptop very versatile indeed.