I did it. I have sinned on many levels. I put Vista Business on my MacBook Pro. Not only is Windows OS dual booting (through boot camp) on my Mac but its Vista no less! I take comfort in knowing that it was a free copy given to me. I installed it primarily because lots of corporate stuff does not play nice with Mac. I need to use some software and VPN garbage that I can not do without windows. O yeah and also I wanted to play Counter Strike: Source and Team Fortress Classic 2. Interestingly enough, my MBP rocks Vista without breaking a sweat. Something I have seen it hard for many of the low to mid range windows based PC's do. Using Vista only makes me want to quickly run back to OSX. The battery life drops to about half of that when using OSX. The screen brightness and wireless settings are the same etc. The keyboard shortcuts for them even work with the included Vista drivers.

Setting up Vista on my Mac was pretty simple. Run the Boot Camp installer which creates a partition for vista to chill and install away. Be careful, I had to install Vista twice because the first time I created too small of a partition for windows to live. Vista it would seem takes up 12GB by its self. My 15GB partition was no match for Vista + 5GB from Half-Life. I had to delete the partition and start over, this time with 25GB. Overall it is the best experience using Vista I have had to date. Vista is still pretty lousy and I have a hard time telling anyone to buy a new pc now because Dell and many others have stopped selling PC's with XP on them.

On a nicer note, my MBP with its 256mb Nvidia GeForce video card handled CS:S and TFC2 with no problem for a long gaming session at a LAN party. I set almost all of the settings to be maxed out (including screen rez and got about 60fps. After tweeking the settings a little I got great performance out of it, enough to make it not worth buying a desktop el-cheapo gaming rig or even bother using my perfectly capable 3 year old gaming rig. Portable gaming here I come. Now who wants to host the next LAN party?

Installing Vista!


Vista up and running.