Pros & Cons of running Windows 7 on a MacBook Air (2011)..

Just a stub message here to start the thread.

 

OK, for all of you that have been requesting this and sending me PM's about it, here (finally) is my video review / impressions of Win7 on my new 2011 Macbook Air i7.
First know that the video got cut off abruptly for some reason about 2 minutes from the end. However, all that is missing is showing me connecting my Dell external monitor (U2711) to the Thunderbolt (DisplayPort) jack, and running the monitor at the gorgeous native resolution of 2560x1440.
The screen looks a little grainy in the video for some reason, so I went ahead and took a till shot of it for you to review, to get a more accurate view of what it looks like. It is crisp, sharp, and bright:
http://www.creativedatatech.com/downloads/ScreenShot.jpg

When you pull up the video link below, be sure to select the HD version of the video, and view it in full screen mode. After all, it did take me FOREVER to upload it (6+ hours!).
Macbook Air 13 (2011) running Windows 7 64-bit - YouTube

What I was also about to say in the video before it was cut off is that the sound is pretty good at low and medium volumes, but when you try to turn it up more it just sounds tinny and shallow (not a lot of bass there), as to be expected with a laptop of this size, I guess.
If you have any specific tests you want me to run, I'm open to doing that.

 

I am interested in the MBA running purely win7.
Is there any way of speeding up the initial efi->bios emulation (i guess hiding behind the inital white screen)?
also what annoys you most about this implementation considering its not a native win7 ultrabook?

 

I believe that a native Win7 installation, wiping out OS-X would eliminate most of the white BIOS screen start up time. I base this on the fact that when booting into OS-X, it doesn't spend very long at all on this white screen when booting. Doing that would surely turn a MBA into a pure native Win7 Ultra-Book.

 

Actually the white screen doesn't take that long - and it won't change if u wipe all the partitions. The problem is with the Intel graphics drivers - without them Win 7 boots about 15 seconds quicker.

Cons:
- slow boot
- keyboard backlight at maximum level every boot
- missing some multitouch gestures
- not so great keyboard layout

 

The slow boot isn't really an issue for me because I never do a full boot. I just close the lid and it goes into sleep mode. It wakes back up in 2.5 seconds.
With a laptop that can last 10+ days in sleep mode, why would anyone bother to shut it completely down each time?
Also, as far as multitouch gestures, I found all of the ones that I normally use to be fully supported: tap to click, double-finger scrolling, double finger tap for right-clicking stuff. It doesn't support pinch to zoom, but that gesture seems more relevant to devices with very small screens (i.e. - smartphones and tablets).

 

I can see that a lot of those multi-touch gestures available in OS X would be really useful for things like photoshop. It would be great to be able to move around the screen like that. But I've never actually used it so that is purely speculation.

@smckenna: I don't know if you mentioned this before, but how did you partition the HD between osX and windows? (I mean how many GB for each)

 

It just so happened that the MBA I snagged off eBay had the larger 250GB SSD drive, so I had plenty of room to lay things down:
65GB OS-X (26%)
185GB Win7 (74%)

My planned usage of the machine is to spend almost all of my time using the Windows 7, but I occasionally like to hop over and play with the OS-X too.

 

what about TRIM? do you have that enabled?
as i have been led to believe, ACHI is required to enable TRIM.
ACHI will slowdown boot time.
ACHI will also prevent suspend (due to a bug?)only hibernate is supported.
hence resume times will be slower...

 

I'll run the command tonight to see if the TRIM is enabled on my MBA.
I didn't change the default setting for what the laptop does when I "close the lid", so I'm not sure if it is set to "Suspend" or "Hybernate". I suspect it is still set to "Suspend" (sleep), and I haven't had a single problem with the machine waking up yet. The resume time, as stated earlier and shown in my video above, is only 2.5 seconds upon opening the lid.

 

yeh the resume time looks awesome in the vid
awaiting your result with interest

 

Actually I was hoping for one cool gesture from my previous Windows laptop - three finger left/right swipe. That would be back/forward in browser for example.

Windows says TRIM is enabled.

The drive is in IDE mode, not AHCI. And TRIM doesn't need AHCI to work.

Also there are no problems with suspend / sleep.

 

so the ssd suffers in performance due to using legacy IDE as a transfer mode
hence avoiding the resume problems with ACHI

 

I'll run a benchmark on my SSD tonight and publish the results. However, I think my 250GB SSD is slower than the MBA's with the 128GB.
I would be interested in comparing my results to the UX31 and another MBA user that has the 128GB SSD.

 

Which tests?

ATTO @ Windows for my MBA - 225 / 225 MB/s .

And for Mac OS X - 245 / 260 MB/s ( write / read ).

P.S. That's a 128GB Samsung drive.

 

OK, cool. That gives me a good baseline to compare. I too have a Samsung SSD, but the 250GB model. It's nice to see that there is a Mac OS-X version of ATTO. Do you have a link for the ATTO?

 

Naaaah

It's Disk Speed Test from app store - didnt' write the name, coz I think it's the only one for OS X.

 

OK, I'll look for it in the App Store.
Thanks.

 

@smckenna from our earlier posts, I didn't mean to imply that the the UXX11 series monitors have speakers, which they don't. Dell sells an optional soundbar for that. But I do know they have audio pass through from the HDMI inputs to 3.5mm audio, and my hope is that DisplayPort audio passes through as well.

 

Oh, OK. I can test a set of headphones out connected to the audio jack of my U2711 monitor. Hopefully it won't be too hard to find the jack.
Now you've got me curious. Why wouldn't you just connect your speakers or headphones directly to the audio jack on the side of the MBA?

 

Someone earlier in the thread mentioned that the Intel graphics drivers cause Windows 7 to boot slow. I was wondering wouldn't this be the same for all notebooks with this chipset? Also, since it is apparently possible to boot without them, what functionality would I lose in this case?

Regarding the backlight of the keyboard: I thought the backlight was controled by an environmental light sensor, or is this also a MacOS only feature? And secondly, as somebody has already created a 3rd party driver to control the backlight, shouldn't it be possible to turn it off on boot with this driver (or at least if we ask the programmer nicely )?

 

I mentioned it boots slower coz of the drivers, coz I've checked it. And it's MBA thing only. I've tried at least three different drivers and got nothing. UX21 got the same chipset, and it boots in less then 20 seconds.

I don't know if light sensor actually works in Windows, but for sure it's buggy.

I've tried contacting PowerPlan7 author to get him to do something about the keyboard at windows startup, but haven't got any replys.

 

I'm just trying to minimize the number of connections that would go to the MBA - its going to be my primary machine so less connections to worry about when I come home/leave is better.

I really like how simple connections are between the Macbooks and a Thunderbolt display but that monitor is an absolute downgrade from the Dell UXX11 series. If this works out the only connections necessary would be USB, power and DP.

 

I'm using only DP->HDMI adapter but it outputs sound nicely.

It should work for DP-DP cable too?

 

OK, you should be good to go. I was able to confirm that the audio portion of the signal is being passed to my U2711 monitor from my MBA, and onto the little green audio output jack on the bottom of the monitor by hooking up a set of headphones. It sounded great.

 

On the Mac OS-X side, I was getting 248-250 on the Writes, and 265-268 on the Reads.
On the Windows 7 side, about the same performance as you got (maybe a little less):

 

Sequential read & write performance doesn't suffer as much in IDE mode as random small block I/O. And multi-threaded performance is severely affected. So the real world performance difference between AHCI and IDE mode might be bigger than those numbers suggest. Nevertheless, it still *seems* fast under Windows.

 

Just for comparison (and possibly a little bit off-topic), here is the performance of my Intel SSDSC2MH250A2 in my XPS-15 laptop. It is running the full SATA 3.0 interface at 6.0Gb/sec.



Notice how it has the exact same tell-tale drop in performance at the smaller block sizes, just like in the MBA, so this probably isn't due to the IDE interface. However, the huge difference in overall I/O capability surely is.

 

Just a quick Q about the mac OS and bootcamp setup. Is it multi-lingual?
I mean can you change the entire OS language in Mac OS? and also when you are setting up in bootcamp?

The reason I ask is that I would be buying the Air in Japan if I get it, and want to make sure I can change everything to English.

 

just go to a apple store in japan and test out mac os x and see if you can change the language.

 

Yes to being able to change the language on both Mac OS-X (it forces you to choose when you first power up the machine after getting it), and the Windows 7 (it asks you to choose during the setup process).

 

Changing language on Windows 7 ? Actually it would be only for Ultimate version - you can download language packs from Windows Update then.

 

Thanks guys, that should make things easier.

 

Now that I think about it, I think it is asking for the keyboard layout / language. Maybe that only affects the keyboard, and not the entire operating system language.

 

hmm, well I had kinda decided to go for the Air, until I saw the localized keyboard layout they use here
Its really stupid. You can see it here:
???? - ??????? - MacBook Air - ?????????????????????

For some reason they put the caps lock key where the option or control key would be. And there is only one fn key on the right side only.. its dumb.

 

DANG! I feel just the opposite. I wish they would have put that FN key right next to the arrow keys for the U.S. keyboard layout! The ONLY time I use the FN key is when I'm trying to get to the Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys that are on the arrow keys.

 

Yeah, actually I'm ok with the fn key being over on the right, but I'm worried about the other keys on the left.
As you can see, control and caps lock are reversed, which seems bizarre. I'd be worried about turning caps on all the time by mistake. And also having trouble hitting the control key when I want it.

By the way, do you use the control key much in OS X? And under windows is that key the same as the ctrl key on a pc?

 

I don't use OS-X enough to say. I'm always booting into Win7 by default.

 

The Ctrl key on Mac OS is used for a number of reasons. It's not the same as on Windows because Apple uses a logical system in regards to Command and Cntrl and on Windows the Cntrl key not logical.

For example, Command P or V is "commanding" the computer to print or paste. Apple doesn't use Cntrl because you're not "controlling" the computer to print or paste. See the logic?

One example of using Cntrl on Mac OS is when you zoom the screen. You're "controlling" the screen movement, not commanding it.

 

So basically command is a start menu or right click button in Windows.

BTW I think you can order a US layout in the Apple store?

 

There's been some progress regarding booting Windows 7 via EFI. This will solve the AHCI problem, but problem remains about accelerated video. Still, it's good to see progress.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=696523

 

But AHCI is causing sleep problems?

Windows 7 performance via bootcamp is kind of very good for me.

And as of boot time - i'm using sleep all the time. Windows 8 should be final not that far away and it would boot much faster.

 

There is that option if you buy directly from the apple store, but unfortunately it is much more expensive to buy direct from them. I can find it about $250 cheaper from other stores online.

 

If using the hack to get AHCI working, then you will have sleep problem instead. Pure Windows EFI boot will give AHCI and no sleep problem, because BIOS emulation is not involved at all any longer.

 

I can only confirm TRIM is working on MBA with Win 7 via Bootcamp in IDE mode.

I was testing just after system install and it was ~225 / 225 MB/s. Yesterday after a month it was ~ 210/210 MB/s.

Today I was mostly idling on MBA and the results are ~225/225 MB/s again.