Saturday 5 May 2007

Vista on Boot Camp and Parallels

On

In my previous entry I stated I was installing Vista and how much trouble it was. Now I'm going to quickly explain how well it runs and if it's worth installing.

Boot Camp

First off will be on Boot Camp.

In order to install Vista I had to format my FAT32 drive to NTFS. This means that I can no longer write (copy to) my Windows partition anymore, like I previously could with XP. There is always Macdrive 7, but I don't have the money for that at the moment. A free alternative is MacFuse, except I have heard that isn't very fast. I'm not exactly desperate for copying files to Windows at the moment anyway.

Vista seems to perform relatively well on my Macbook 1.83 GHZ with 2 GB RAM. It gets a performance rating of around 3 (rated by Windows of course) and I have all the eye-candy turned on. (Aero effects and such) Everything seemed to be ok. Any problems is to do with Vista and not Boot Camp.

The Boot Camp drivers installed as normal, and I have yet to find anything different. (Touchpad clicking still doesn't work)

Parallels

Vista on Parallels was almost a completely different experience.

It installed flawlessly. Much better than Boot Camp. That was pretty much it. I'll say it early on, if you're planning on running Vista on Parallels I wouldn't recommend it. It runs pretty bad.

Because of the lack of Graphic Emulation in Parallels, everything runs in software mode. Meaning no Aero effects making Vista the same as XP. Or you'd think. A lot of things run very slow. I tried playing a game of Solitare and it lagged so bad it took me 3 sec to navigate to the close button.

I've delegated more resources to Parallels so that when I use it, it won't be as hard to use, but it's still a disappointment. But with the exception of performance, Vista seemed ok.

Conclusion

Most people wouldn't even consider upgrading to Vista, let alone trying to run it on their Macs. But I always like to try out new things and took the plunge, which leads me to the conclusion, if you plan on running Vista on your Mac, stick with Boot Camp.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool M@lew. So the Intel GMA950 ran Vista Ultimate + Aero perfectly fine?

And how's the iSight camera in Windows?

Matt Lew said...

Yep, ran fine on Boot Camp. iSight works like normal as well. All you need to do is install the relevant Boot Camp driver.

Anonymous said...

*wants to let you know, that Vista was a premature birth due to marketing pressures, although everything should work as Microsoft's Gaming flagship gets released along with Direct X 10.* Macs are good, but i find that they are extremely restrictive, in the way that you cannot mod the hardware. But PC and Mac both have a different Target audience. I'm a self proclaimed Gamer.Thus, Mac's suck. =p

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