Vista and the Mac

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Vista and the Mac

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BigAlbie

Posted 15/08/2007 19:27:56

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Last Login: 31/10/2008 16:18:27
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Kept seeing articles about running XP or Vista on the web and in the press. Lucrative business trip Down Under meant I could finally buy that MacBook I've been craving for 12 months. Problems with Vista and a HP printer for my parents and my obvious lack of knowledge finally got the better of me. Obtain Vista and Apple's Boot Camp and proceeded to load onto the MacBook. One painless install (took about 45 minutes in total) and we now have Vista dual-booting alongside OS X.........

So, for those who said a Mac could never run Vista, wrong, it runs quite happily. for those who are curious what it is like, my 1st, brief, impressions are below........

it is a much better interface than XP, much like OS X but a bit 'glossier' if you know what I mean. Even with a lowly GMA950 graphics card you can see the eye candy is better than XP's interface. Found most features and utilities were in similar places to those of XP. Being asked to 'continue' for various operations/software installs was annoying. AVG free, AdAware and SpyBot all seem to run OK. Not tried CCleaner yet. Loading drivers for Hauppage TV stick and setting it up to run with Media Centre a bit long-winded but it runs fine. Not had much time to delve further yet, so compared with OS X running on the same machine....?

Initially there isn't much to choose between the two. There is a difference in boot times, 25 seconds for X and a minute or so for Vista. Both are stable but Vista is much more resource hungary - just running Task Manager it used 615MB RAM. OS X uses roughly half that running Activity Manager but that will change when X 10.5 Leopard arrives (Intel machines will need 512MB to run like Vista though PPC Macs will require half that). Other than that, there's little difference I have found so far in features and effects between them.

So does it mean I am planning to abandon Macs? Oh no, I'm quite happy with X thank you. I have got to the stage where I have a need to know my way around Vista to help people with problems & questions here in the village. The ability to dual boot the 2 OS means I don't have to build or buy a dedicated PC for the task.

So for anyone who might be wondering whether a they can run Windows OK on an Intel Mac, especially Vista, the answer is yes, no problem.

For the technically curious, the MacBook spec is Core 2 Duo running at 2.16GHz (latest model in white), 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD with 32GB partition for Vista and the 'pedestrian' 950 graphics set (not bothered cos I aon't into gaming).

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