24: Building the Vista-MacBook
Turning the key on a cross-platform system-an update as promised
24 hours ago, the Fed Ex truck delivered a MacBook that had seen China, Alaska and Memphis on its way to me. Here is a brief chronology of what followed.
- 09:15 AM – Unpack box.
- 10:45 AM – All Mac updates installed. Fooled around exploring the OS. Set up my user profile.
- 11:00 AM - Boot Camp setup complete. Hard-drive partitioned.
- 11:20 AM – UPS delivers Windows 64 Bit SP1 disk.
- 12:45 PM – Windows finishes install (Lunch was involved here too so there was some delay.)
- 01:30 PM – Last nagging MacBook hardware issues are resolved and the unit is recognizing everything while booted in Vista. Reboot to Mac-Reboot to Vista – Woo Hoo!
- 01:35-8:00 PM – Software install, download update, install – repeat.
- 09:00 PM – Bed.
- 07:00 AM – Software install, download update, install – repeat.
- 09:00 AM – Calibrate LCD with Spyder in both operating systems.
So far the process has been pretty benign. There was a brief moment of panic the first time that I looked at Windows Device Manager and saw all those yellow exclamation points. The MAC OSX disk was supposed to have a utility to fix that but, wouldn’t you know it, it wasn’t 64 bit compatible! Argh! Digging into the disk further, I found a buried folder with all the 64 Bit drivers and the 64 Bit version of the Vista side of Boot Camp. Woo Hoo!
I am about 70% reinstalled for application software with most of that going on the Vista side. I have some plug-ins for image editors and some sundry applications to fill in yet. Then it is trying to reconfigure workspaces in a variety of programs.
Pain factor on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is doing nothing and 5 is a standard Vista install on a PC hardware platform: 6
It is slightly more difficult than a Vista install but not significantly so. No bad words so far. No calls to tech support. No software that won’t run-yet. I haven’t tried Ventura yet…
I will keep you posted on my progress.
Rikk Flohr © 2009
March 25, 2009 at 6:53 am
thanz
March 25, 2009 at 10:23 am
Thanks for the post.
March 30, 2009 at 12:42 pm
[...] after my last update on the Windows/MacBook, I experienced my first serious glitch in the form of an errant Bluetooth [...]
August 31, 2009 at 9:26 am
How smoothly does Vista run on the Mac?
August 31, 2009 at 9:28 am
Thus far it has run bullet-proof. The only issue I have seen is that in sleep mode (when the lid is closed) it doesn’t keep time. After hooking to the internet for a minute or two, the clock updates. Other than that, it is very fast, very solid. I use this in Windows about 75% of the time. I haven’t tested too much since the Snow Leopard update but I don’t expect that to have impact. In October, this will be going to Windows 7 and that should be fun!