Okay, so a few days ago I decided that I needed a new hard drive for my Macbook Pro.
I’m going to share with you my experiences of doing the upgrade and giving Vista a go instead of XP.

I ended up settling on a Western Digital 320GB Scorpio drive which has been an awesome drive that i would recommend to anyone.
Doing this upgrade meant that I needed to clone my current hard drive to the new one and I needed to find a way to move my current Boot Camp partition to the new drive along with it. For moving the Leopard partition, I used Super Duper!. The great thing about this program is that it’s fast, does a perfect bootable copy to the new drive and it’s free. I used another free Mac app called WinClone to backup the Boot Camp partition to a file, which contained Windows XP SP2.

Next I attached the Scorpio drive was attached to an external USB caddy, and while was booted into Leopard, Super Duper worked it’s magic. I find it really is amazing that this program is able to backup while the OS is running and thank you to the developer for making it free. Anyways after it was done, I used Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant (in the /Utilities folder) to partition the drive for Boot Camp. I now had 300GB to play with so I gave 40GB for Windows… just enough space for Visual Studio and a few games.

After Boot Camp had repartitioned the drive I had a choice. Install Windows XP or give Vista a try. I mean everyone seems to hate Vista and generally when I ask people why they hate it, they can’t give me a straight answer. Kinda like why some people don’t like Macs…but they are generally cheap skates who have all the time in the world to build their own box, not to mention dealing with the problems that Windows throws their way.

Stigmas aside, it was time to try Vista. After the installation, the tinkering began. First the Leopard disc went in to install the drivers for the Apple hardware and after I was free to explore the new OS. First impressions: the login screen looks nice and shiny. The default wallpapers are nice and I like the look of the gadget sidebar. Vista looks nicer than Windows XP but its resource usage is way higher than Windows XP.

Navigating around Vista, I notice that it’s very “verbose” what I mean by that is that Vista seems to go out of its way to tell you how to use it. The Control Panel is filled with text links to configure things, making it require the user to read a lot of text.

Vista’s Control Panel

Mac OS X System Preferences, it seems much cleaner while providing the same functionality:

Using Vista’s file Explorer and the control panel in Vista makes me feel as though I’m on a porno site with a million popup ad’s all trying to sell me Viagra. UAC and the taskbar bubbles compound the problem. UAC (the warning that makes the screen black and asks you to allow or deny) was very annoying. I comes up at the most ridiculous times such as changing your screen resolution or changing mouse settings.

Vista’s User Account Control (UAC)

Vista was constantly getting in my way which I probably notice more being an OS X user as Leopard really lets you get things done. I decided that UAC was too much of a disturbance in my workflow so I disabled it. Ironically, the act of trying to disable UAC activates a UAC popup window. Okay, Allow. Now let me get back to my work. Not so fast says the Windows taskbar, whichs popups up a message saying, “UAC turned off” and would I like to “fix this problem”.

What it feels like using Vista

Microsoft obviously thinks their users are a bunch of retards that don’t know how to use a computer and they need to be protected from themselves. I think they should really give their customers a bit more credit. I mean we all interact with interfaces on a daily basis. Whether it’s the interface on your DVD player, Television, Car, Stereo Deck. We all manage to figure out how to get them to work yet they are all very different. Microsoft needs to take a page from interface designers, the simpler it is, the better it is.

Needless to say, this whole Vista exercise turned out to be a complete waste of time. I also had graphics card driver issues which i’m not going to go into but I’ll be sticking with Windows XP for the time being.

If you plan on using Windows on your Mac, if you really must then use XP.
Your brain will thank you for not using Vista.

Brock