As I mentioned in an earlier post I installed Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook a couple weeks back. Now that I’ve had a chance to use it a little, I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.

I never used Microsoft Vista before installing it on my Mac. I have seen it on a couple users machines at work, but never sat down and used it myself. The copy of Vista Ultimate I received from the Microsoft event has Service Pack 1 installed on it. I’ve heard that SP1 fixes a lot of the gripes that people had with Vista. It runs pretty darn fast on my MacBook Core Due with 2 GB RAM. There was a time when the machine that was rated best to run Vista was a Mac; I don’t know if that is still true.

So, here are my likes, and my dislikes.

Likes:

1. The UI is a heck of a lot better that the XP Playskool look.
2. The side bar gadgets are nice, very similar to Widgets on Mac OS X, but still nice.
3. The search that’s built in is a lot better than the previous search in Windows. It works almost as well as Spotlight on Mac OS X.
4. It boots and shuts down quickly.
5. I like that they got rid of the stupid “My Computer”, “My Music”, etc, and just replaced it with “Computer”, “Music”.

Dislikes:

1. The security feature is very weird. If it needs to pop up a dialog to get your permission your screen goes black before doing so. Also, the security dialog that pops up isn’t all that helpful. I double clicked a program to install it, it popped up a dialog with the name of the program, and if I clicked more info, it showed a GUID. How the heck does that help? It just seems kind of tacked on.
2. The new start menu sucks. When you first click on it, it looks nice. If you click on All Programs, it just turns into a long scrolling list. Not very nice looking.
3. At the end of the day, while it looks nice, I don’t really see what would take a team of engineers the size that Microsoft has, 5 years to develop this OS.

I don’t consider it to be as bad as I’ve heard, but then again I received a free copy. I don’t think I would have felt it was worth the $259 for Ultimate.

Tags: microsoft, vista

Yes, you read that title correctly. I installed the latest version of the Microsoft OS, Windows Vista, on my MacBook. I didn’t install it in a virtual machine using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, I actually used BootCamp and installed it directly on my MacBook in a separate partition. I did this for two reasons. Number one: I didn’t use VMWare Fusion or Parallels because my MacBook is one of the old ones that can only support up to 2 GB or RAM, so I would only be able to give my virtual machine around 1 GB and still have a responsive Mac. Windows Vista wouldn’t be a happy camper under 1 GB of RAM, especially since the reason I installed it is for reason number two. Number two: I realize at the end of the day, even though I love Apple and my Mac, the thing that brings home the paycheck is Microsoft development. We are getting into serious development at work now using .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 2.0. I need to have a machine at home that I can use to work on, and I’d rather not have to lug around a laptop back-and-forth to work every day.

Now, as for why I installed Windows Vista Ultimate, when Windows Vista hasn’t exactly received stellar reviews? I had a copy that I got for free for attending a Microsoft developer session a few weeks back, and didn’t feel like scouring the web to find a pirated version of Windows XP.

I don’t see myself booting into Windows very often, but it’s nice to have the option. This is actually the reason I waited until Apple switched over to the Intel platform, so I would have the option to install Windows. I’ve played around with Vista for a few minutes now, this is the first time I’ve really used it, and while I don’t think it’s as great as OS X, I do think it’s more pleasing on the eyes than Windows XP. It also seems to be running pretty responsively, which is good. We’ll see how it goes once I start doing development on it.

Tags: microsoft, apple, vista