This is hard for me to say, I’ve been a hard-core Mac user since '84, heck, I started on the Apple IIe and IIc, I was one of those hardliner “Microsoft is the enemy, Bill Gates is Satan” types, I voluntarily avoided Windows like the plague, from 3.0 to 98, I shunned it, it was “bad”, it was “evil”
Yes, I was fully enveloped in the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field…
Recently, I’ve taken a job at a local computer repair/sales shop, a little two person place, we service both Mac and PC, as well as build our own towers, so, I’ve been learning the Windows side of the industry, mainly XP to Win 7
And you know, it’s not all that bad, (well, aside from Vista, but even the Windows guy isn’t too much of a fan of Vista), in fact, Windows 7 is <choking back bile> pretty…damn…good…
Hold on, I need to go take a shower, I feel… dirty
in all seriousness, I’ve been pretty impressed with 7 on our system builds, it’s incredibly easy to install and set up, almost Mac-like, in fact, it just works, so, I decided to do an experiment with my MacBook
I grabbed a spare SATA drive, and swapped out my Mac OS drive, the spare drive was unpartitioned, completely blank, I slid in a Win7 install disc into the optical drive, powered on the 'Book and held down “C” to force boot off the optical drive
The MacBook recognized the Win7 install disc, and went through the conventional install process quite happily, upon completion, the MacBook was running at about 90% complete, missing the iSight drivers, the right-click support for the trackpad and the sound output, other than those issues, the MacBook ran Win7 just like a conventional PC, once I installed the Boot Camp driver package, the machine was running at 100%, all the “missing” features enabled
I torture tested the machine for the rest of the afternoon, Win7 was rock solid stable, unflappable, and only choked when I shut down, pulled the Win7 drive back out, put my Mac drive back in, hooked the Win7 drive up in an external USB 2.0 housing and tried to boot off the external USB 2.0 drive, no go, it flat out refused to acknowledge the presence of the drive
So, I decided to take the plunge, and used Boot Camp to partition my Mac drive into a Mac/Windows drive, and installed a fresh copy of Win7 on it, it actually feels a hair quicker than my Mac OS in actual usage (2.2GHz Core2 Duo with 2GB RAM, 250GB Western Digital Scorpio Black hard drive)
In fact, I’m posting this thread from the Win7 partition on my MacBook, so far, I haven’t seen any major flaws or glitches with 7, it still needs a little tweaking, like installing MacDrive or the HFS+ Windows driver from Snow Leopard
This way, I can force myself to learn more about the Windows side, yet still have the ability to return to the Mac OS, and I still want to find some way to set up a bootable external Win7 drive
I’m a Mac, and Windows 7 is actually a pretty nice OS…