A FAT formatted portable USB drive (8 GB or more) and an ISO image of a Windows installation disk (preferably 64 bit version).Boot Camp Assistant, which comes pre-installed on your Mac.The following are the key items required for installing Windows on your Mac with Boot Camp: We’ll now walk you through the different stages of setting up a Windows-Mac OS dual boot using Boot Camp. All Intel based Macs nowadays come with a preinstalled application called Boot Camp, which assists you with the Windows installation process. And in this regard, Apple provides in-house software that can help you set up Windows on your Mac and the best part is that it’s free. If you consider using only one OS at a time, or if your hardware is not powerful enough, you can dual boot Windows with OS X. But before proceeding any further, ensure you already have a legitimate copy of your preferred version of Windows, as that won’t be included with any of the solutions explained below. We’ll now demonstrate how to set up and work with dual boot and virtualization. In the end, it’s up to you to pick your best option. If hardware specifications aren’t much of a concern, you may implement either dual boot or virtualization depending on how you want to use the two operating systems. But system performance aside, if you want to run Windows applications on Mac OS or access data and switch between the two OS frequently, virtualization is more suitable. Dual booting is a better option when you need dedicated resources for getting the job done. Unless your Mac is configured with sufficiently high-end hardware, running Windows on it using virtualization may affect the performance of your Mac as a whole, which in turn might lead to poor user experience on both Windows and OS X. However, the two OS in this case need to share the available hardware and thus have limited access to resources.Īs you can guess, virtualization requires extensive hardware resources in order to simultaneously run two or more operating systems. Alternatively, running Windows inside a virtual machine allows simultaneous access to both Windows and OS X. But in order to switch from one OS to the other, the system needs to be restarted. Dual booting Windows with OS X lets both operating systems to fully utilize the available hardware. The other option is to run Windows inside a virtual machine running on OS X.īoth of these alternatives have their own advantages and disadvantages. One option is to dual boot Windows with OS X. There are primarily two ways to install Windows OS on a Mac. 1.2.2 Setting up Parallels Desktop and installing Windows.1.1.2 Setting up Boot Camp and installing Windows.

How to install windows on mac