May 7th, 2007
A surprising switch back to Vista from Mac OS X
I must admit I was more than a bit surprised to read this post by Nik Cubrilovic of OmniDrive this morning. Seems his Mac OS partition vanished but the NTFS partition he had set up for Boot Camp on his Mac survived the gremlin attack. Nik installed Vista and describes his delight at the experience– one so positive he says that he's now planning on switching back.
Overall, Vista is very fast and offers many new features. What used to cost $300-400 on XP in additional applications (Nero, ScreenGrabber, SpyBot etc.) I now have out of the box with a slick operating system and interface (the interface, oh the interface). In the past 15 years I have gone from DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Linux, OpenBSD, Windows 98, Windows 2000 (a nice OS for the time), XP, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and now Vista and working with Vista this weekend reminds me of the first time I ran an early preview of Mac OS X and spent an hour running my mouse across the dock (back in 2000). The job of building an operating system isn’t an easy one, and Microsoft have managed to take a good leap forward with Vista which they should get some credit for (although it probably is at least 2 years late). To all my Mac OS X and UNIX using friends, I haven’t left you - but feel free to argue in the comments, but only after you have installed bootcamp.
I've been relying on Parallels to provide my Vista on the Mac experience and, by and large, I'm very happy with the experience. The two issues I've got are the battery drain and always-on fan that accompany my Parallels sessions, making it a less than ideal solution when I'm on the run since the MacBook isn't winning any prizes from me for battery life to begin with. I've been holding out on doing the full partition-the-drive thing until Leopard is released but with the recently announced delay in the new version of the OS and stories like Nik's, I'm thinking it might be time to just go for it and set up a Boot Camp partition to get the full native Windows-on-Intel experience on the MacBook.
Marc Orchant has been building, testing, and sometimes breaking hardware and software for 25 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
