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- Running Vista on a Mac
Microsoft's long-awaited-but-little-anticipated Vista hits store shelves on Tuesday but there's one group that actually seems quite excited about it -- Mac users. Earlier this month at Macworld, the most crowded booths after Apple's iPhone display belonged to Parallels Inc. and...
Microsoft's long-awaited-but-little-anticipated Vista hits store shelves on Tuesday but there's one group that actually seems quite excited about it -- Mac users.
Earlier this month at Macworld, the most crowded booths after Apple's iPhone display belonged to Parallels Inc. and VMWare, two software companies that help run Windows a Mac. It was quite remarkable: both were mobbed.
The reason's simple. After years of being locked out of the computing mainstream, Macs users are back in the game. New Intel Macs can not only run OS X and Windows – they can do it at the same time.
And unlike a lot of Windows PCs out there, Intel Macs are great machines on which to run Vista. Thanks to their recent vintage and horsepower, most exceed Vista's demanding minimum specs.
For the last couple of weeks, I've been running Vista on a quad-Xeon Mac Pro. Click the link to see how it's working out.
The Mac Pro is a very fast and capable OS X machine, but it's an even faster Windows Vista machine.
Vista really flies on this beast, and feels like it's faster than OS X – it boots faster, folders burst open and apps launch instantly.
(The Mac Pro has two, dual-core 2.66GHz Xeon chips; 2GBs of RAM; and a medium-range NVidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card)
I'm especially delighted with Vista's "glass" Aero interface, which works in all its glory on this machine.
The OS is dark and handsome. It's really quite exciting. Like the Zune's interface, it's artfully done. The beautifully-rendered shadow effects and transparency give Vista a greater "depth" than OS X, which looks a little flat and well… old fashioned in comparison. I know this is because Vista's new and novel, but it makes OS X look dated.
There's a bunch of interface features I wish Apple would copy. Vista's widgets, called "Gadgets," are always on top – a vast improvement over having to hit a hotkey to see them.
Vista's icons are big and colorful, and frankly, a lot more logical and easy to read than some of OS X's, like the intelligible iWeb icon.
I like the way Windows Explorer file browser has a "back" button, web browser style.
Of course, in many ways it's the same old Windows. There are pop-up dialogs galore thanks to the new security features, and the Start menu, though slimmed down, is still a confusing mess. Maybe it's just me.
Thanks to Apple's Boot Camp software, installation was a breeze.
I used Boot Camp to format an internal drive for Windows and create a CD of XP software drivers for the Mac-specific hardware. (Although they're XP drivers, most worked, but I had to install them individually instead of as a package. Tips here).
There are some nice touches. Vista automatically detected and installed drivers for my printer. When I went to print I expected a wizard, but it was already set to go.
The only big problem – and it's been driving me crazy – is getting the sound to work. Neither the rear digital optical out port nor the two analog sound jacks will work, despite all kinds of driver jiggery-pokery. The internal speaker did work initially, but I've somehow messed that up.
I tried to get Vista working with Parallels, but it doesn't yet support Vista installed on a separate hard drive. Parallels says this will be addressed shortly.
I hoped to sync my iTunes library to my Zune player, but although copying the music via an external hard drive worked fine, the Zune synced only the first fifth of my iTunes library – artists A through E – before it said the player was full. I haven't had time to work it out yet.
Thing is, after I got Vista set up, I'm like, what now? I noodled about a bit, but I've no real use for it. My entire computing life is already in OS X. The eye candy is nice, but I'm already committed. I guess that's what a lot of Windows users think when they look at the Mac.
Hopefully Vista is spurring Apple to reinvigorate the interface of OS X in Leopard. According to reports, Leopard is already resolution independent. Let's hope the rumored interface overhaul, Illuminous, does for Vista what Vista's done for OS X: make it look dated.
lkahney
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