Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro don't work quite so well with Windows

As part of our testing of the new "unibody" Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, we installed Windows Vista via Boot Camp so that we could run our standard set of PC benchmarks. Both laptops run Vista quite happily and the bundled MacOS X DVD installs the necessary drivers. So far, so good...

However, a couple of issues have cropped up in Windows Vista and both appear to be related to the drivers for the new nVidia GeForce 9400M and 9600M GT graphics chipsets. First, the nVidia Windows driver for the MacBook Pro only supports the high-power 9600GT chipset. nVidia has acknowledged this issue and a post on its support site, states that:

When running Microsoft's Windows XP or Microsoft's Windows Vista using Apple's Boot Camp, the system locks into higher performance mode which uses the Geforce 9600M GT discrete GPU for all graphics related tasks and can not be changed to use the Geforce 9400M motherboard GPU for battery life mode.

The other problem is that battery life under Windows is terrible – just 90 minutes for the MacBook and 60 minutes on the MacBook Pro, using Battery Eater’s heavy use test. This is most likely a driver issue too, and we suspect that the graphics drivers are also to blame.

We're still waiting to hear from Apple about battery life problems with Boot Camp, but if it's any consolation, we suspect few MacBook and MacBook Pro buyers will be too concerned about their Windows weaknesses. We hope to include an update on in our full reviews of the MacBook and MacBook Pro later this week.