Today I received the 15″ Macbook Pro (2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB 5600 RPM). And am really stunned with the real cool packaging from Apple. No surprise, why everyone loves to open Apple boxes.
As this is first ever Mac for me, and it took me lot of time to figure it out how to use and where to go for what when the OS booted. I had a hard time to open any file as single click or double click from trackpad doesn’t work as it does in regular PCs along with missing right click button from the trackpad. Anyway, fought with trackpad and keyboard settings and shortcuts to have right mouse and other things to work. So, I decided to install Windows Vista on this MacBook, as I wasn’t quite ready with Mac yet to figure out what to use out of the box. Anyway, I need Visual Studio 2005 to be up and running, so I need to have Windows anyway.
I installed Parallels build 3188 and configured 32GB for Vista Ultimate along with allotting 1GB to this virtual machine. The installation went smooth and base OS started working, except the real cool Aero theme. The performance is also not that bad. But the look and feel is not what I wanted along with fonts which are not that clear for reading, so I decided to go for BootCamp instead.
Again downloaded and installed BootCamp Beta 1.2 and configured to install Vista on to this by alloting fixed 32GB for this. And this time, the actual fun started once the system booted. I installed Mac drivers which I created during the initial setup during BootCamp Assistance. Once all drivers are loaded, Its really cool to see Vista on Mac along with Aero Theme. It was much much faster than running Windows Vista on Dell Latitude D820 with the similar yet better configuration, and am going to stick to using Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook Pro for time being. The Windows Vista experience index score was 4.7; which is a pretty good deal. The lowest score 4.7 is from the Graphics card. I installed Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 and its SP1; I can see that every application starts instantly and does not take much time. I need to profile my build timings to see if I can get any better performance from Mac. Kudos to BootCamp team and the folks who added the support for the Windows drivers. The latest Beta 1.2 does have all the drivers needed for Vista Ultimate to work. I see from Device Manager that none of the components has Yellow mark or missing drivers.
Here is the few tweaks I made to have betterment as I hailed from the world of PCs.
- Configured the trackpad to support right click with two fingers
- Better trackpad speed and key touch
- Installed InsanelyMac Input Remapper 1.0.01 Beta to have support for rest of the mac keys (like volume, brightness adjustment etc)
Few cons:
- I did not like the trackpad getting stuck at times and it doesn’t move when needed, its frustrating
- On Mac, not sure why I can not open or run a program with a single or double click; and I always need to right click and open it
- Not yet figured it out how to use mac iSight on Vista; but I can see that the driver is installed and ready to use.
The final point is, If you want to see the real cool fun of Windows Vista along with Mac features then try installing Vista on Mac using BootCamp…It would not dissapoint you.
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