Running Windows Vista on a MacBook Pro

The other day, like Dan Miser, I got a MacBook Pro (MBP) laptop for use at work. I'd shopped around looking for a similarly outfitted machine from Circuit City, Best Buy and Costco and didn't have much luck as they either came with a very slow 4200 RPM drive, too little RAM, 15" monitor or some other issue. Ordering a high-end XPS from Dell was going to four weeks to arrive and I started work on Monday. I'd been researching MBP's for awhile as a replacement for my aging home machine and hadn't really been thinking about it as a work machine but while out shopping at Valley Fair and I walked into the Apple store to check out the iPhone and I wandered over to look at the MacBook's. One of the really nice things about an MBP is there aren't a lot of options to choose from.

If you look online, the Apple website has one page of options for the 17" MacBook Pro compared to the 12 step (seriously, there are 12 steps) wizard on Dell's site for a 17" XPS laptop. The defaults for the MBP are really in my sweet spot where the Dell machine requires considerable tweaking along with choosing all their "recommended" options.

Why doesn't Dell default to their own recommendations? I just don't get that!

For example, the MBP defaults to 2GB of RAM while Dell recommends 2GB but defaults to 1GB?? Anyway, I asked an Apple store employee if they had variations of these machines in stock and they did so suddenly this was looking like a viable option. I went home, found a bunch of links where people posted very positive results running Windows on the MBP and now I'm running Vista on a Mac.

Setting up Vista was a total piece of cake. I downloaded Boot Camp, installed it and ran it. It prompted me to create a Mac Windows Drivers disk, asked me the drive partition size and prompted me to start the Windows install. It really couldn't have been much easier. After Vista installed I put in the drivers disk and a few reboots later and Vista with it's Areo UI boot up just fine. Anyway, Vista appears to be working great on this machine. I'll post an update regarding performance once I get some development behind me.

Oh yeah, there's also OSX which I'm now free to play with and leverage it's strengths.

On a different note I'm still watching this series of post's regarding the "Ultimate Developer Rig" from Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwater.