The best laptop for Vista? A MacBook.

After my fracas this morning, I just ditched XP and loaded Vista onto the MacBook.

Now, in the last few weeks I've supplied quite a few Vista laptops, various specs. Mostly I'll power them up, install SP1 and any other bits and pieces, then put them back in the box and ship them to my clients; so, I know a thing or two about Vista setup.

Anyhow, as I sat there doing some work on my iMac, the MacBook leapt into life, a mere 22 minutes after slinging the Vista DVD in. 

Yes, 22 minutes from installer setup to looking at the Vista desktop. Stunning. Most PC laptops take 20 mins to run the 'assesment' after Vista preload, so for it to be installed and assessed within 22 is amazing. Bootcamp then installed within 5 minutes off the OS X DVD and there it was - half an hour gone and Vista installed on my MacBook.

Due to the relatively poor graphics ability it only scores 3.8 on the Windows 'Experience' Index (who cares!) but it's the fastest-booting, fastest-running machine I've seen on Windows ever.

So, want Vista? Buy a Mac.

Boot Camp Woes - XP and Vista on OS X

Whilst 'fiddling' with my MacBook this morning, I thought I'd have a go at getting a dual-boot installation of both XP and Vista going. 

Figured I'd install XP first to a 30-gig partition, split that into a 10GB and a 20GB partition using the XP installer and then roll XP into the 10GB; then reboot off the Vista DVD, slide that baby into the 20GB and using VistaBootPro, set XP as the default OS startup. Plus, set XP as FAT32 and Vista as NTFS, and XP can be the 'swap' partition to allow me to copy data onto Vista from OSX, using the FAT partition as temporary storage.

Anyway, it was a great plan. Until, that is, the Boot Camp partitioner fell over, leaving me with a 120GB hard disk reporting as 80GB - 30GB missing. 

I tried everything - disk utility, repair permissions, verify disk - all lucked out. Even the OSX installer on the Leopard DVD wouldn't have any of it.

In the end I've had to trash the whole damn disk using the XP utility on the XP disc, boot into the OSX DVD installer, erase the disc as Mac OS Journaled and then reinstall Leopard.

So, if you're thinking about doing it - my advice would be ... don't!

Leopard Server iPhone

And here's the Leopard server iPhone background...

iPhone - The Ultimate OS X Leopard Theme

I found the ThemeBuilder app available on installer to be a great little piece of kit. Having spent a while trying to find my ideal iphone theme - none of the Leopard ones I could find came close - I created my own, using the OS X system icons, photoshop CS3 and Fetch, along with ZiPhone's pre-installed BSD subsystem and SSH.

Here's what I came up with. The first two shots are using the default Leopard background with icons moved around to show it off - the third shot uses the Leopard server wallpaper, which I actually prefer I think.

The Book of Mac

Ordered another new Mac yesterday ... hey-ho.

Have been in need of a Vista laptop for a while, much as I disike the Operating System. Didn't want to buy a Vista laptop though.

So, bought a new 13" MacBook with OSX Leopard, and I'll run that and bootcamp Vista onto it. With 2.5GB DDR2 even Vista should run reasonably well...