Deleting a Boot Camp partition. I made a partition, installed Boot Camp, and set up 250GB of my drive for Windows. Three years later, I’m all Mac—no need for anything on the Windows.

Windows 8 and OS X are both in their own seperate partitions on the boot drive. Partitions are sections of the physical drive that appear to the hardware as separate volumes, much like a cd appears different than a USB thumb drive. Windows 8 and OS X are both in their own seperate partitions on the boot drive. Partitions are sections of the physical drive that appear to the hardware as separate volumes, much like a cd appears different than a USB thumb drive. Apple Footer • This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only.

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Do You Actually Need to Use Boot Camp? RELATED: Before you install Windows, stop and think about whether or not Boot Camp is the best choice for your needs. There are a couple of drawbacks to consider. When you use Boot Camp to install Windows on your Mac, you’ll need to re-partition your drive, which is going to take up quite a bit of your available drive space.

Since storage on a Mac is fairly expensive, it’s something you should really think about. In addition, you’ll need to reboot every time you want to use Windows, and reboot again when you want to switch back to macOS. The benefit of Boot Camp, of course, is that you’re running Windows directly on the hardware, so it’ll be a lot faster than a virtual machine.

If all you need to do is run a few Windows applications on your Mac, and those applications don’t a lot of resources (like 3D games), you might consider using a virtual machine like (there’s a free trial),, or to run that software instead. The vast majority of the time you don’t actually need to use Boot Camp, and you’d be better off using a virtual machine. If, however, you’re looking to play Windows games on your Mac, Boot Camp might be a good choice. RELATED: For most people, though,.

It’s something we use at How-To Geek every single day for testing software and running Windows. The integration with macOS amazingly well done, and the speed blows away Virtualbox. In the long run, the price is well worth it. You can even use Parallels to load your Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine while you are in macOS, giving you the best of both worlds. What Version of Windows Can I Run? Which version of Windows you can run depends on your Mac: recent models support only Windows 10, while some older Macs only work with older versions of Windows. Here’s a quick outline, along with links to Apple’s official lists of supported models. • Windows 10 is supported on.

• Windows 8.1 is supported on most, with some exceptions. • Windows 7 is supported, for the most part,, and you’ll need an even older Mac to run Windows Vista or XP. Note that Macs can only run 64-bit, non-Enterprise versions of Windows. RELATED: To install Windows, you’ll need an ISO file of the installer. You can if you already have a product key, though. If you’re installing Windows 7, you’ll also need a USB drive at least 16GB in size for the installer and drivers. Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 do not any external drive for installation. How to Install Windows on Your Mac Ready to install Windows? It’s probably a good idea to before getting started, just in case.

Odds are nothing will go wrong, but any time you’re partitioning things there’s always a chance. Done? Let’s get started. You’ll use the Boot Camp Assistant application that comes on your Mac. Open it by pressing Command+Space, typing Boot Camp, and pressing Enter. The Boot Camp Assistant will walk you through partitioning, downloading drivers, and starting the installer for you. Click “Continue” and you’ll be asked which ISO file you’d like to use and how big you’d like your Windows partition to be. RELATED: How you should allocate the space depends on how much space you want for your Windows system and how much space you want for your macOS system. If you want to resize your partitions after this process, you’ll need to use a third-party tool, so choose carefully now. Note that, if you’re installing Windows 7, the order here is slightly different: Boot Camp will first guide you through setting up your installer USB disk, then ask you about partitioning.