by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/07/27 11:06 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/07/27/4081784.aspx
Our story thus far:
It started when I mentioned that my Dell laptops have a new neighbor, who says hello. A new MacBook Pro that I was going to use for my world outside of Microsoft.
I was naive enough to think that would stick, and because of that it did for a little over a week....
But a bug report kind of sucked me back into it, and begat a large bunch of bug reports and a reminder statement on supportability of keyboard layouts (in Boot Camp 1.3 and MSKLC (also 1.3) -- excitement, enjoyment, and a wrinkle or three).
I skipped the step where I talked about what I did for the configuration....
Well, I started by making sure I had installed all of the latest updates.
Then I installed Boot Camp 1.3.
Like Brian, I was concerned about the lack of 64-bit drivers, but I wanted to have some fun too. So I did one less than recommend step -- I made my Windows partition to be 79gb so I would be able to recognize it later, and then when I ran Windows setup I deleted the partition and created two new partitions in the space formerly occupied by that 79gb.
(I booted into the Mac partition to be sure I hadn't hosed it!)
I then installed 32-bit Vista and all of the updates in one partition.
And then I installed 64-bit Vista. As people reported, there are a bunch of missing drivers (including the network driver and the wireless -- which makes installing updates much more complicated!).
Ok, back up and boot into 32-bit Vista, look to see that the network driver is apparently the Marvell Yukon 88E8058 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller, and it was pretty easy to find the 64-bit driver. Downloaded it, put it the 64-bit install's driver right in my desktop folder, and then booted back into the 64-bit Vista.
From there I just installed the driver. Once it was there I got all of the updates (and windows Update offered me the driver for the Wireless and lots of other goodies including Bluetooth. In fact, aside from the Apple keyboard layouts bring broken on 64-bit (not important to me since I didn't need them and they are broken on 32-bit Vista anyway!), 64-bit Vista on an Intel MacBook Pro via Boot Camp seems to work quite well!
And I get about 3.98gb of RAM, with 3gb on Vista 32-bit, of course -- which means RAM is about ¼ gb worse in Vista 32 but ¾ gb better in Vista 64. On the whole, much better than Dell's story, at the moment. :-)
After I installed all of the updates and rebooted, I ran that Windows Experience Index and got a 4.8:
0.1 better than that Dell Precision M90! :-)
In fact, the only thing missing is a Smart Card reader (which I would need for a RAS story, for both x86 and x64 Vista). But there is no huge hurry there, and with all of the spare USB ports on this thing I'm not worried. The light weight makes it appealing for travel.
This post brought to you by D (U+0044, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D)
# Keith on 28 Jul 2007 9:56 PM:
Do your fans work? Mine appear to be disabled.
# Michael S. Kaplan on 28 Jul 2007 10:16 PM:
They seem to be working (at least I am not overheating). Why, are you running hot?
I think Brian said he was maye having problems with that, but there was no follow-up....
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