Vista Advice

Hi Guys,

Great site by the way. This is my first post.

I am looking for advice on buying a Mac.

I really really love the look and feel of the 20" Mac and am thinking of purchasing one. However, this is where I need your help. I work in financial advice and all the software I use is windows based only.

I have read loads of stuff about dual boot with Boot Camp so I am fine in that respect but is it possible to go with a complete install of Vista or is the best option to dual boot and give most of the partition to vista? Also which version of vista is best to go with? Business, Enterprise or Ultimate?

I also need to be able to use dual view with a mac cinema display. Is this possible? Will it exactly replicate what is on screen on the mac? And are there any adaptors that would need to be purchased?

A freind of mine has a MacBook booting with XP and has issues with the video out not working under XP. It works perfectly under Lepoard, but in XP it sort of detects the display then disconnects and keeps doing that without actually working. You just keep hearing the windows ping pong noise to indicate the display is connected then immediatly disconnected! Will I have the same problems with the 20" Mac and Vista?

I look forward to some help on these matters and thank you in advance.

Kind Regards,

Paul Pitchford.

I had that same issue with XP not displaying on a external but Vista does it perfectly. I run Vista Ultimate on just a 20gb partition and it runs great. If your going to be using it a lot I would run a 50gb partition or bigger depending on how much space you need. Also make sure you have a good bit of RAM, 2gb+. Good luck!

Running Vista Business here and it runs very fast on my MBP with 2G RAM - I use mostly windows as well (for business) so I gave Vista a larger partition than OSX. I haven't had a need for the video out yet so I haven't tried it. I know there are a lot of Vista haters out there, but I really can't say I have had any bad experiences with it. It's never crashed in the six months or so that I've been using it and it does have a much nicer GUI than XP. It also supports more memory than XP.

how about VMware or Parallels? (although vmware is more powerful)

this means you can run windows in a window while using your mac. (or even fullscreen!)
and the cool thing (for parallels anyway) is that you can use something called coherence mode to seamlessly integrate your windows apps with your mac, meaning you won't always have to run/see the windows desktop

however this may not be for you...

what kind of programs are you using? are they major memory consumers?

correct me if i'm wrong ppls

links again:
www.vmware.com
www.parallels.com

I've used both Parallels and VMWare for both Windows XP/Vista and Linux Fedora 8/Knoppix installs. To be honest I am leaning towards VMWare at the moment just due to the fact that it handles my desktop resolution setting in linux better.

VMWare has the ability to use your boot camp partition as a VM though and that sounds pretty cool.

Since using these two products I no longer have a need to run a dual boot system.

OK, so Parallels has Cohesion to match VMWare Fusion's Unity mode. That's cool.
If all you are using the Windows OS for is a few business-only, with no need for high-end graphics, I'd suggest going with VMWare or Parallels only, without using Bootcamp. Why? Because you'll waste time rebooting from one side to the other.

If you use Fusion, you can literally drag and drop files from your Windows desktop to your OS-X one. I can't tell you how much more productive I am this way. And I typically have XP on the left screen, OS-X on the right when I am at my desk.

One thing: Just because it's running on Mac hardware doesn't mean XP or Vista is any less vulnerable to malware. Get a good AV for both sides. I'm rapidly becoming a Kaspersky fan, and if they decide to release an OS-X version, I'm so ditching every other one out there.

Good luck!
P

cohesion or coherence? i 4get... :S

u can also drag and drop files in parralels, not sure about vm...
i would strongly recommend you use the virtualization method, saves time

as for the virus issue, the viruses u contract while running windows will not affect mac (obviously)