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Administrator
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 11/11/2008 9:24:04 PM
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| Tue, 2007-02-13 21:18 cjad.com As you might have heard me discuss on the radio in recent days, I just bought myself a beautiful new iMac 17" 2.0Ghz with 1G Ram (that I hope to soon upgrade to 2G, gotta finish paying this off first.)
Being the geek that I am, I ran out the next day and bought a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium, Microsoft's latest offering (everyone, even fellow geeks, thought I was crazy to lay down $299+tax for a second OS.)
Since Apple started using Intel chips for their computers in the middle of last year, you've been able to install Windows on them in one of two ways: as a dual boot, or in a virtual machine. I'll discuss the differences in a later blog entry and possibly probably even a Tech File, but I wanted to mention some of my observations first. So, here they are in no particular order:
- Windows XP running in Parallels (virtual machine software) flies. It doesn't slow the machine down at all.
- Parallels "Coherence" mode is very cool. It lets you run Windows not just in another window; not just full screen, but literally side-by-side with OSX so that you can seemslessly run a windows app and an OS X app at the same time, as if the Windows program was native to OS X. "Awesome" would probably be a better word than "cool" to describe this feature, although even awesome is a little bit of an understatement.
- You can run Vista in Parallels, but you can't yet use your boot camp install (ie: the version used for the dual boot) the way you can with XP. I hope that will come out in the next version of Parallels.
- I find myself forgetting which OS I'm in and trying to double click on a program's title bar to maximize it in OS X( that minimizes it) or going to the left side of the app's window in Windows to shut it down (of course, it's on the other side in Windows, but you can double-click on the top left corner to shut down a Windows program)
- Same thing with keyboard hotkeys like ctrl-c for copy, which is command-c in OSX. In fact, the command key (comparable to the windows key on XP and Vista keyboards) is used almost everywhere you might use the ctrl key on windows.
- The iSight camera on the iMac still doesn't have a Vista driver.
- Vista and OS X are VERY similar. The similarities are very striking.
- Vista search => OSX Spotlight
- Vista folder hierarchy => OSX folder hierarchy
- Computer instead of My Computer
- Documents instead of My Documents
- Music, Pictures etc now on same folder level as Documents, just as in OSX
- Vista Explore => OSX Finder
- Despite the similarities, in terms of pure aesthetics Vista wins hands down
- For simplicity and quality of the bundled software, OSX comes out clearly on top.
cjad.com
AMD64 X2 5200+ 2.60GHz | 3GB DDR 667 | RAID 0 SATA3.0 WD Caviars 320GB total | Foxconn MCP61VM2MA-RS2H Geforce 6100 nforce400 chipset | Vista Ultimate x86
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