Switching from Windows to Macintosh - Chapter 4

Howdy;

Amazing. It's still going well. I did encounter one glitch on the Mac, however. This is related to the Logitech VX Revolution mouse I installed in Chapter 3. It seems that if the mouse looses communication with it's USB key, OS X turns grey and calmly informs you that it needs to reboot. This happened twice before I figured out what was going on. Note that OS X very gracefully recovered, no fuss, no muss, just need to reboot. I am somewhat surprised, even so, to find that something like this can force a reboot in OS X. And I am seriously annoyed at Logitech's crappy documentation on this product, which is so unlike their normal quality. Note that this is a subjective interpretation of what is going on and not definitive.

The other new news - this afternoon I bought a full copy of Windows Vista Business. First, I installed the Parallel Desktop software I had previously purchased, told it to look for updates, updated it, created a virtual machine using the default settings for Vista, and installed Vista. This was amazingly easy! Everything without fail worked on the first try. I have used VMware Workstation in the past, with XP as the host OS and another (full, purchased) copy of XP in the virtual machine, as a means of backnig up my entire programming environment. I also used VMware with Linux in a virtual machine, to experiment with it. So I've had some experience with other virtual machine software. On a 3 Ghz XP machine with 1 GB ram and 160 GB disk, VMware was always a bit jerky and slow.

This Parallel Desktop is far and away better than VMware, at least on this machine and in this environment. You can run it in a window, or you can run it full screen; there's a nifty transition where the entire screen rotates as if it is on the surface of a cube - neat eye candy. I installed my favorite PIM into Vista, following the setup of the shared directory which is used for passing files back and forth between OS X and Vista. Switching between the OS's is intuitive. Speed is excellent - I haven't installed any really resource intensive tasks in Vista yet, but running Info Select (the aforementioned PIM), the performance hit from running Vista in a VM is undetectable. Amazing. Smooth mouse motion, and so far, everything I've tried works. I immediately had internet access in Vista via OS X and Airport. This is the first time I have used a virtual machine within which the performance is such that it will actually be NOT frustrating to use. The only shortcoming I see is that, so far at least, the Parallels Desktop does not appear to allow Vista to run the Aero interface, probably because of lack of hardware video accelleration in the virtual machine.

I am not yet ready to offer an opinion about Vista in depth, but with a couple of hours behind me, I feel a bit unimpressed. The interface is smoother, and a lot of stuff has been moved and rearranged. The wallpaper is prettier than in XP, for some reason. The security wizard (or whatever you call it) covers firewall and spyware detection, but I don't see any direct mention or advice regarding anti-virus software. I will have a better idea after I've used it for a few days.

Here's the synopsis so far. MacBook Pro is a marvelous piece of hardware, OS X is just mind-blowing marvelous after using XP since it came out, and Vista is pretty but does not seem (at first glance) to have anything on OS X. And now I have a laptop that I can theoretically run any piece of software that is either OS X or Vista compatible. Without being annoyed by performance issues. This is not trivial.

The saga continues...
-Pop