What problems exist with Vista Ultimate x86 on MBP?

So I am getting pretty frustrated with Dell canceling my m1330 order a month after it has been made. I hear a lot of people are going to the MBP instead.

The problem is that I MUST have Windows, Fedora Core 6 or Fedora 7, and Ubuntu installed in order to properly get my school work done (Ubuntu isn't for the school work, just for fun.)

Vista has been kind of give and take for me. After using it for half a year I decided that the things that MS improved outweighed what they screwed up (for my purposes.) Plus I can get Vista Ultimate from my University for $18.87.

I have been trying to read as many forums as possible and I am under the impression that not everything in the MBP is compatible with Vista, even with BootCamp 1.3.

I was hoping to get some feedback from the users on this forum as to the compatibility issues you have faced as well as work-arounds you have discovered.

 

I gave up on my m1330 too after waiting for 20+ days and got a MBP instead.

it seems u want multiple OS. The stock hard disks on a MBP are 120/160GB I don't know if this big enough for your taste. If it isn't u can buy a 250GB 5400rpm drive from newegg to replace it.

The ACPI power management is not working perfectly in vista. Vista shows the MBP as running on battery even though it is plugged in. You have to remove the magsafe adapter from the computer and then plug it in everytime you boot to get the ACPI to show the MBP as running on A/C

Also, when you install vista ultimate x86 initially with boot camp, you have to use EasyBCD to rewrite the boot loader. Without doing this, you get an irritating error everytime you boot up. This error doesn't prevent you from booting up though.

Well I uninstalled vista after 1 day so I didn't notice anymore problems. Using XP + OSX now.

Dump the m1330! Get with the crowd and get a MBP!

 

Hook me up

For Vista x86, all software is compatible. The incompatibilities more related to drivers:

1. Touchpad: not all the features of OSX work in Vista. i.e. you actually have to press the button to click (the touchpad tap-click doesn't work). Also, the double-tap-click does work for rightclick, but just double-tap doesn't work. You also can't turn it off when an external mouse is plugged in, and the keyboard/accidental-touch sensor is disabled. In other words, it retains the basic functionality of clicking and rightclicking, without the better features. I can't remember if the 360-degree two-finger scroll works or not.

2. Battery life - battery life under Vista is substantially lower than under OSX. You go from 5 hours to like 3-4, depending on how many things you're willing to turn off and sacrifice (bluetooth, wifi, aero, brightness, etc.).

3. Ambient light and motion sensors don't work as well. (i.e. the screen doesn't adjust its brightness automatically, same with the keyboard LEDs).

4. Fan control isn't as good. Software fan control doesn't work in Vista atm. It does ramp up as necessary - Vista makes the computer produce a ton more heat than OSX, so your fans will be on more often.

5. Keyboard - it's a Mac keyboard. The delete key functions slightly differently, the "windows" key is one key to the right of where it would be on a PC keyboard, the left alt key one key to the left. No right alt or right-ctrl. No pgup, pgdown, printscreen, etc.

6. What the guy above mentioned about the power plug. Windows doesn't recognize it on loadup.

7. I haven't had the trouble with booting into Windows or heard of it that he described however. I use Windows Vista business ed though.

 

That is good to know. I have used EasyBCD before so I know what to do there. I was going for a 160gb hard drive and I have a 500gb firewire/usb/esata drive for file storage so that shouldn't be an issue.

I'm going to look more into using Parallels as well. It looked like it may be well worth it as long as the performance is there.

I get one copy of each for free: Vista Business, XP Pro, XP Pro 64-bit. I can get only one copy of Vista Ultimate for $18.87.

Yikes! I didn't realize driver support was that bad. I wonder what it is like for Linux.

 

Check out VMWare's Fusion application for Mac OSX. It offers a lot of what Parallels offers, and 2 cool additions:

1. Fusion supports 64-bit OS's like Vista x64 and XP x64.
2. Fusion allows you to assign a processor for each virtual machine running.

There is one major caveat that Fusion has, and that is that it supports DirectX 8.1 but not 9.0. DirectX 9.0 is needed for Vista's Aero interface to work properly. If you intend to game on your MBP, it would be better to use Boot Camp to boot into Windows. Other than that, using OSX and Parallels/Fusion will work just fine.

Also, for a short while now VMWare Fusion is $40 (USD) as a pre-order for its official 1.0 launch. Parallels has been around a bit longer in the Mac OSX world and has its software for $80 (USD).

 

woah man, what school is this through?

ill give ya 50 bucks for ur free vista biz copy.

 

A lot of students can get free licenses for Microsoft software through MSDN-AA. It's limited sometimes, I could only get Vista Business for example, and no localized version.

Back on topic: Apple are planning to release the final version (non-beta) of Boot Camp with Leopard right? I assume the final version would fix the problems that occur under Vista/XP right now. So if you plan to upgrade to Leopard or can wait until it's released, a lot of the current problems under Vista/XP could be fixed.