There are a lot of reasons to pick another laptop over the
MacBook Air -- especially if you're into little things like "useful ports" -- but the comparison to non-Apple hardware isn't even relevant unless you're willing to switch to OS X, right? Well, the crew over at Xbit Labs decided to even the slate and evaluate the MBA solely as a Windows machine, wiping the drive clean of Leopard and installing Vista Ultimate. Although actually getting Vista on the Air was a bit troublesome due to the lack of a built-in optical drive and the Vista installer's refusal to wipe out the OS X partition, once installed the OS performed fine, with Apple-provided drivers activating the media and brightness keys and even the multi-touch trackpad. The only major issues were over-aggressive activation of CPU power-management, which resulted in dramatic slowdowns during some tasks, and the fact that the case got fairly warm during use -- both issues MBA owners using OS X have reported. Overall, while the MBA was a solid if unspectacular Windows machine, the lack of support and nagging issues with running a pure Windows MBA mean you're probably better off going with laptop designed for Vista -- hmm, we can think of one that might
spark your interest.
posted March 20th 2008 9:33PM
Apple hardware has no functionality? Really? Because I have Vista 64-bit installed on my 8-core Mac Pro with 10 GB of RAM and it runs pretty darn well actually. When I told Crysis to automatically pick the graphics settings, it set everything to "Very High". Does that sound like hardware with no functionality to you?
Try not to be so badly misinformed. Maybe try to learn a little bit about the subject matter before talking about it.
Can't imagine why anybody would want to use tVista in the first place! It seems to me that this awful operating system has been responsible for more 'switchers' than anything else!
Maybe because you haven't used it with SP1....ah oops...sorry...see what I did there? Seriously I've been using Vista with SP1 since December...It kicks Leopard's ass in terms of stability....or at least it did until 10.5.2 came out. WIFI is still twichy as hell on my C2D MBP though.
"Vista installer's refusal to wipe out the OS X partition"
Simple....at the point where you partition the OS hit Shift+F10 to bring up the command prompt. Then use the Diskpart and nuke OS X. I did that with my MBP...it takes 2 minutes...but of course you need to know what the hell you are doing in Windows vs. a knee jerked reaction that OMG! Windows can't do that! Its no more difficult then Linux.
As if the Mac user's aren't drawn to the same topics. At least I'm not seeing posts on Windows forums along the line of "Here's a new poll on the best hardware of '07....everyone go over there and vote for the iPod Touch or iPhone.....FYI which I see all the time on Macrumors...zealots indeed.
"The vast majority of people who choose to continue to run Windows do so because Windows machines have not personally experienced a BSOD since early releases of Windows 2000."
- So these rational consumers stuck with a horribly unstable OS all those prior year? Thank goodness for non-existent Windows fanboys.
"Also, remember that the successful rise and dominance of Apple iPods is mostly thanks to Windows users, because early generation iPods were infinitely better than the competition at the time and the price premiums for them were not as significant."
- $499.00 for a 5GB iPod with Firewire only that wasn't even released for Windows for many, many months. Thank goodness for those Windows users again. What would Apple do without them?
@clak - Highest Ranked posts versus your Lowest Ranked posts. I think the people have spoken.
@zak - i don't recall defending windows at any point in this thread. at all. way to "think different"
Way to not know what the context of the conversation is. I was referring to a post above yours regarding the defending of Windows fanboy comments. Not a post by you. But since your original post was trying to paint us Mac users as people who hate Microsoft, maybe you can show me where I said I hated Microsoft.
Was it when I said I have Vista installed and it runs pretty darn well? Because I can totally see how you could misinterpret that to mean "I hate Microsoft".
Sigh, all this hatred.
It's interesting that someone tried Vista on a Mac. Well done for being innovative.
To the rest of you arguing about who's been hating on who more, just look back through Digg Technology articles relating to Mac or Windows, you'll see very few Windows-fan comments, and a lot of Mac Fanboi "Oh Em Gee, OSX is teh Best, Windows suxxors" style comments...
So, in response to the person above suggesting that Mac-fanbois couldn't possibly pick on Windows users, because there are less Macs, I call bullshit. You zealous bunch of morons never shut up, and Windows users are getting tired of it.
I use Macs at work (web design for my local council) and Vista at home. I can see the benefits and problems with both. My laptop at home with Vista on it (the one i'm using now) is a year and a half old, with fairly poor hardware, and it's been fine, ok, a bit slow at times, but not bad. With Vista SP1, and an upgrade to 2 gigs of RAM, it's performing very very well.
The Macs at work are a different kettle of fish. We've had 14 over the past year, from about three different batches, and so far, we've sent 6 back... Which is a shame I guess, coz I quite like them. They do their job admirably.
Summary? Grow up. Actually use Vista and OSX comparatively, and (to both Windows and Mac-fanbois)just accept for once that some people like other stuff to you, that's their opinion, and they're free to have it that way.