About 2 weeks before Christmas, I decided to give Vista another shot. I popped in the 32-bit discs that came with my Dell Optiplex 755 box and away I went. I did a new install over top of my XP Pro disc. I did not reformat, and Vista was smart enough to archive all the old shit into the directory c:windows.old for me. I had no idea it would do this, but once I found that out, I was pretty stoked. Anyway, fast-forward three weeks. I learn that a friend of mine who works for Microsoft can get copies of Vista Ultimate for $45. I went with him to the MS Company Store in Mountain View and procured two copies of Vista Ultimate for me and a copy of Vista Home Premium for my folks. One copy of Ultimate x64 on my Core2Quad dell box, and a copy of Ultimate on my MBP using Boot Camp. I dropped a new drive in the Dell for the x64 install and then migrated my data over. This was pretty much flawless. I did need to DL the correct network and audio drivers from the dell website beforehand, but once that was taken care of, everything went flawlessly. In fact, that box has been rock solid since the install. And with the x64, it’s pretty zippy. I have no complaints at all. For my MBP, I went and bought a brand new 320gb 7200RPM 16mb Cache 2.5″ SATA2 drive. 27 screws later, I was reinstalling the OS and running the migration assistant from the old disk via a 1394a drive can. I partitioned it off during the install and got my data migrated. When I went to run boot camp, I learned that the BC assistant *requires* you to repartition your drive, making my initial partitioning moot. So I blew away the spare partition, rezised the OS partition, and rebooted. Boot camp ran fine after that. One thing to note: do not erase the boot camp partition if you want to put linux on the box. The OSX Boot Loader doesn’t like that much. What I did on my first attempt was to remove all the boot camp partitions, and add my own new partitions so I could run Ubuntu on it. Unfortunately for me, the Ubuntu bootloader never installed correctly, and I was unable to do anything to those partitions from Disk Utility within OSX. So I reformatted, and just used the regular BCA-created partition for Vista. Now, it’s been a while since I looked into installing 64-bit Vista onto the MBP via Boot Camp. Last time I saw, you needed to get the MacPro boot camp drivers in order to get everything working nicely. I didn’t have those available, but I did find the network drivers. Installed them, got vista’s networking going, and updated the system. Most of the available drivers were found via Windows Update. I was still having some issues, so decided to try – for the hell of it – the boot camp installer that was provided to me with my OS disks that came with the laptop. Sure as shit, they worked just fine. The only thing left to do was install 3rd-party patched nvidia drivers to get the full video capability out of my nvidia card. I got those here: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ Man, with those drivers, this MBP runs slicker than snot, I’ll tell you. The only thing is that the damn trackpad doesn’t work for beans and the machine runs EXTREMELY hot. Sadly, there’s nothing you can do about the prior, except use an external mouse. Even Ctrl-Click doesn’t work as a right-click. Fortunately, the latter is easily remedied using SMCFanControl2, available here: http://homepage.mac.com/holtmann/eidac/software/smcfancontrol2/index.html Boot into OSX, set the fan speed, then reboot to vista and *whammo!* problem solved. It’s a shitty hack, but it does work. Oh, and if any of you are feeling like trying the Windows 7 beta, I say GO FOR IT! I have it installed on a spare disk at home, and it’s a nice improvement over vista. It’s still got quite a learning curve over XP, but they’ve streamlined a lot of the Vista functionality. If I hadn’t just spent $90 on two copies of Vista Ultimate, I’d be running it full time on both the MBP and the destktop box. The 64-bit version is just sexy, too. The best thing? The *official* nvidia beta drivers are available via windowsupdate for Win7!!! Can you say, “SWEET!” ??? That’s all for now. Thanks for visiting and Keep Coming Back!!!]]>