GFXCARDSTATUS FOR WINDOWS FOR MAC
GFXCARDSTATUS FOR WINDOWS MAC OS X
GFXCARDSTATUS FOR WINDOWS DRIVERS
GFXCARDSTATUS FOR WINDOWS FULL
GFXCARDSTATUS FOR WINDOWS PRO

The Mac OS X Disk Utility supports re-sizing the Mac OS X’s HFS+ partition without destroying its contents. To create the shared FAT32 partition would require me to re-size the existing partitions. I’ve updated this post to refer to FAT32, instead of exFAT. FAT32 is older (less buggy and more reliable) and uses two file allocation tables (while exFAT uses just one) so it should be more recoverable. I decided to reformat the shared partition as FAT32 using Disk Utility with “MS-DOS (FAT)” format I can live with the 4GB file size limit, but I can’t live with corrupted data. Disk Utility was not able to repair the exFAT partition. I did some research and found that exFAT on Mac OS X often got corrupted and would disappear. (exFAT is an enhancement of FAT32 that removes the 4GB file size limitation.) However, after copying back my data to the shared exFAT partition and accessing it from both Mac OS X and Windows 7 under VMware, the shared partition got corrupted within a day. Update: Initially I used an exFAT partition, instead of FAT32. The best solution (free, non-wasteful, and fast) would be to have a shared FAT32 partition which both Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and Windows 7 can read and write to. Alternatively, I could use a cloud service like DropBox but I would have to pay for more storage space, there would be duplicated files on both the Mac OS X and Windows partitions, and there would be a dependency on having Internet access to sync those duplicated files.

GFXCARDSTATUS FOR WINDOWS FOR MAC

There is a commercial product called NTFS for Mac that allows Mac OS X to write to NTFS, but some reviews indicated that the NTFS partition might get corrupted. And while Windows can read HFS+, it cannot write to it. Unfortunately, sharing information between the two operating systems is inconvenient because while Mac OS X can read NTFS, it can’t write to it. See my followup post on Revert Mac OS X Yosemite Core Storage Back to Mac OS Extended HFS+ for details. The solution is to revert the Core Storage volume back to a plain HFS+ (aka Mac OS Extended) partition before following any of the instructions below. Update: Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite uses a new Core Storage volume manager which does not support merging or re-sizing. This is useful because I found that unlikely applications, like Powerpoint, would switch the Mac OS X to use discrete graphics.

Under Mac OS X, there is an neat application called gfxCardStatus which allows me to force Mac OS X to use only the integrated graphics card. I decided to use Mac OS X as often as I could to take advantage of the battery life and only switch to Windows when I needed to.

GFXCARDSTATUS FOR WINDOWS DRIVERS

The reason for the short battery and heat (the laptop got very hot under Windows) was that under Windows, the discrete graphics card was active all the time! The Boot Camp 4.0 drivers for Windows did not support switching graphics between the integrated and discrete video cards, but instead used discrete all the time. To my dismay, I found that while the Macbook lasted 6 hours or more while running Mac OS X, the Windows 7 lasted at best 3 hours. I then installed Windows 7 Boot Camp on it. It came with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion which I promptly upgraded to Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

GFXCARDSTATUS FOR WINDOWS PRO

I've tested this on my late 2008 MBP 15-incher and it works perfectly.I recently got a mid 2012 Macbook Pro 15in laptop.

GFXCARDSTATUS FOR WINDOWS FULL

Note that as of version 1.7 (now at 1.7.5) gfxCardStatus now includes full support for the 9400M/9600M GT dual-GPU enabled Macs without logging out.

Automatic application updating - checks for, downloads and installs new versions of gfxCardStatus automatically!.

Tiny footprint - doesn't sit in your menu bar and hog RAM or CPU cycles.

Growl support - so you know right when the GPU switches.

Dependent process list - see which applications are currently using the 330M, if it's the active GPU!.

Allows you to manually switch GPUs on demand!.

Automatically updates when the GPU switches, in real time.

Simple, clean 'i' and 'n' icons that signify Intel? HD Graphics, and NVIDIA? GeForce GT 330M graphics, respectively.

GfxCardStatus is an open-source menu bar application that keeps track of which graphics card your dual-GPU (late 2008/2009 w/ 9400M/9600M GT, or 2010 i5/i7 w/ Intel HD/330M) MacBook Pro is using at any given time, and allows you to switch between them on demand.

Gfxcardstatus for windows