I put Windows Vista on my MBA because I need to be operational for business and I don’t have time to learn how to use a new operating system (and find replacement applications for those I normally use, and put backup procedures in place for the new OS, etc, etc).
Kudos to Apple, the MBA hardware is just gorgeous, and Vista with Aero doesn’t let the side down too badly. I’m sure it won’t go down well with the Apple fanboys but screw ‘em.
On to the Vista benchmarking: there’s good performance from the 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, but no surprise that the onboard Intel GMA X3100 sucks ass which really drags down the overall score. The hard drive is not bad for a little 4200 RPM thing that’s normally found in an iPod.
Over all it gets a 3.5 out of 5.9 because of the onboard graphics.
- 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB on-chip shared L2 cache running at full processor speed
- 800MHz frontside bus
- 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM onboard
- Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor with 144MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory
- 80GB 4200-rpm Parallel ATA hard disk drive
I was very impressed with how easy Apple’s Bootcamp software made the install, and the drivers that came on the install DVD seem to do the trick. My only concern is the touchpad, I thought it was a bit flakey and the cursor seemed to hang one time, but it’s running fine now.
Is anyone else out there running Vista as their main OS on the Macbook Air?
Hey,
yes the trackpad drivers are pathetic: freezes, too sensitive to scroll properly, and i won’t even mention the zoom function that suffers from the same sensitivity issues, but worse.
That said, everything else seems to be working fine and I’ve not needed other drivers than the ones provided. I find x64 much snappier than x86 vista.
Just got things live; Win Vista Prem on Air. Wish there was more HDD. So far so good. Loving it.
Hi,
Question: What happen if you have installed Vista using the entire drive, so the Mac OS X is not present, and Apple release a EFI firmware update? Does Apple offer a way to update the EFI through Vista?
Thank you,
Aldo
Hi Aldo,
I’m not certain what would happen in that case, but I would recommend that you keep a small partition big enough to contain MacOSX as a just-in-case facility!
Cheers,
amd
Hi,
Can I ask some questions? I’m thinking about buying a MacBook Air and I want to install windows. Did you have any kind of trouble concerning drive conflicts? Graphical board and wireless, specially.
And did you buy the external dvd drive from apple to install windows?
Best regards
Hey Daniel,
Yeah I got the external drive, it’s an essential, not a so-called “optional” extra!
No problem installing Vista whatsoever, I was really amazed at how easy it was!
Thanks for the comment.
Alastair.