Windows Vista Under Parallels
At this point there isn’t much I can tell you about Windows Vista that you probably haven’t already heard, so consider this entirely subjective, but I really like Vista. I installed Vista through Apple’s Bootcamp in order to test Office 2007 and have since converted that installation to a Parallels-based virtual machine.
As Leander noted recently on Cult of Mac, Vista is screaming fast when you run it natively on Mac Intel hardware and I’d agree with him that Vista “feels” faster than OS X in many respects.
On moving my installation over to a virtual machine, the speed dropped off considerably, but it’s still very usable. Vista performs at speeds roughly the same as XP (also running in a virtual machine), but I did find that disabling the Aero effects sped things up quite a bit. Your own experience will depend somewhat on how much RAM you allow Parallels to allocate to Vista — I’m only giving it 640MB.
Quite frankly I did not expect to be particularly impressed with Vista, but I am. I like the design, it has a very dark, classy look to it. You can dismiss that as irrelevant if you want, but I appreciate well thought out design choices and Microsoft certainly pulled out all the stops with Vista.
Of course I’m not using Vista extensively, I don’t have to live in it. If I did, you can bet I’d be complaining about DRM and peripheral support among other things. If you’re seeking a more extensive review, have a look at Bruce Gain’s recent article.
With Vista installed I now have four operating systems running on my Macbook, OS X, Vista, XP and Ubuntu Linux. Granted most of you don’t test and write about software for a living so you might not have any need for such diversity, but it’s certainly doable if you’re interested.
For the most part I still work in OS X, but using Firefox for browsing, Thunderbird for email (IMAP), and emacs for writing I’m able to get more or less the same experience across all the platforms.
I’m learning to appreciate cross-platform solutions more. I want the tools I rely on for my day to day work needs to be platform independent. I like Vista, I like OS X and I like Linux, but I don’t want to be tied to any of them.
