For a couple of weeks I have a Mac Book Pro as my main workstation. For my work I need to spend quite some time in Windows and only for my cross platform mobile app development with Xamarin I need the Mac Book, so I can develop iOS applications. The past weeks I have been using Parallels virtualization, but when you use it for Windows phone development, you need to enable nested virtualization and then unfortunately the machine has strange lags and is sometimes extremely slow.
One thing I wanted to try out today was to setup Parallels in a different way, using a boot camp partition. Here you install windows on your bare metal using the Apple provided boot camp options.
I must say, installing with boot camp was overall a smooth install, no strange issues I needed to solve. Just a couple of tweaks that I summarize below:
Change the scroll direction on the boot camp windows machine
Only a few things I got used to the past weeks on the Mac Book I really love where the way the track pad works. One thing is natural scrolling, which I got used to in such a way that I could not work with the reverse scroll anymore on windows.
To fix the scroll directions, there is a simple registry key you can set.
Here is the Power Shell command you can use (in admin mode!)
Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\*\*\Device` Parameters FlipFlopWheel -EA 0 | ForEach-Object { Set-ItemProperty $_.PSPath FlipFlopWheel 1 }
After rebooting, your windows will scroll in natural scroll mode, just as on Mac OS
Slowing down the scroll speed on the boot camp windows machine
The track pad now works, but the scroll speed is way to fast, at least for me it is. The way to slow down scrolling on the track pad is by changing the mouse settings in the control panel. Go to the control panel, type in the search keyword, mouse and then select “change mouse settings”
Here you select the tab wheel and set the number of lines to a lower value. for me 1 works best as shown in the screenshot:
Enabling Hardware virtualization on your boot camp windows machine
This one is in the category don’t ask how it works, but it works.
If you first boot into your boot camp partition, you can not enable Hyper-V. reason is that the hardware virtualization is disabled and you normally need to enable this in the PC bios. In this case you need to take the following steps:
restart your machine and use the option key at startup to select the OS-X partition and boot into the Mac OS again. there go to the System preferences and then to the Startup disk option. Then you select your boot camp partition and click reboot.
Now windows starts again, and if you look at the processor information, you can now see the hardware virtualization is enabled.
With this fix I was able to enable Hyper-V, and enable Visual studio to install the phone emulator image and start working on Windows Phone projects again
Hope this helps.
December 15, 2014 at 7:58 pm
Marcel,
How was visual studio performance in parallels, when you don’t have to use A Windows phone project? Currently i’m in douwt, if I go the paralles or the bootcamp option.
Best regards Ewout
February 21, 2015 at 10:52 am
It’s pretty good.
I now use parallels with the bootcamp image I created. When I need to do cross platform development with iOS I switch to the parallels option and when I do my normal dev work that does not requires Mac OS I just run on the bare metal with bootcamp.
the only issue I found is that I need to re-activate Office after I switch, but that is something I can live with. (would like it to be fixed, but it’s a minor annoyance)
December 16, 2014 at 6:37 am
Try…
Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\*\*\Device` Parameters FlipFlopWheel -EA 0 | ForEach-Object { Set-ItemProperty $_.PSPath FlipFlopHScroll 1 }…to get natural horizontal scrolling as well.
March 16, 2015 at 11:23 am
Would you be able to explain in more detail how I could use the “Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\*\*\Device` Parameters FlipFlopWheel -EA 0 | ForEach-Object { Set-ItemProperty $_.PSPath FlipFlopWheel 1 }” command?
I’m assuming Powershell is running cmd.exe but is there a way to type it in or paste?
Thanks,
Yan
April 18, 2015 at 1:24 pm
You start Windows powershell as administrator and then past the following line in the window: Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\*\*\Device` Parameters FlipFlopWheel -EA 0 | ForEach-Object { Set-ItemProperty $_.PSPath FlipFlopWheel 1 }
then press enter
this should do the trick
December 19, 2014 at 3:39 pm
Hi
I am doing exactly the same as you, but I am finding that every time I cold boot the machine in Windows I need to restart back to OSX and then restart back to windows (bootcamp) again in order for the Hyper-V to work. It seems that when you cold boot straight into windows the Hyper-V is disabled every time (and the WP emulator wont spin up) – which is a massive pain. Are you getting the same problem?
February 21, 2015 at 10:49 am
Yep, I see the same.
although I must say that I rarely cold boot into the machine. My machine works up to about a month without a real cold boot. I just close the lit when done and when I then start it again out of sleep it works.
June 2, 2015 at 10:42 am
Hmm this has the nasty side effect that scrolling on my external mouse is also reversed. Any way to get the old scroll back?
June 6, 2015 at 2:45 pm
I am afraid not. I have the same issue and have not solved that yet.
January 11, 2016 at 12:06 am
The problem is that you are changing the value for all the HID devices. You need to change the HID Device ID for the track pad only.
Here is a link to the solution I used… It’s a proper fix using regedit.
http://emacstragic.net/flipping-the-mouse-wheel-scroll-direction-in-windows-7/
Good luck.
February 9, 2016 at 2:43 pm
The reboot to enable virtualization actually worked on my macbook pro running W10! Haha,thanks never would have thought of that otherwise!
February 18, 2016 at 7:23 pm
It works for me since several days and form one day to another the process to activate Virtualization don’t work.
Has anybody have an idea?
I can do what i want, but it is allways disabled.
Thank you and greetings from Germany
Ralf
March 17, 2016 at 1:49 pm
Yeah, I see the same, I just sometimes need to do this trick over again, to re-enable virtualization. I have no clue what triggers the virtualization technology to be turned off.