In previous articles, I said that Vista should run fine on the MacBook, even with its poor GMA 950 graphics. The Vista Beta 2 download was made public last week, and I finally got around to installing it on my MacBook. The full Aero Glass indeed does work fine on my 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook. Below is an H.264 Quicktime video (in two sizes) demonstating what Aero Glass looks like:
Small (640x360p, 25 MB)
Large (960x540p, 32 MB)
Note: The video was taken a low frame rate, so it appears jerky. However, in real life the animation is very smooth on the MacBook.
Although Windows Vista does run, I wouldn't necessarily recommend installing it just yet on Macs. It still has a very beta feel to it, and the install process is difficult, much harder than with Windows XP. Vista will not boot properly on Macs using the Boot Camp application as is. After installation, one must delete a hidden 200 MB partition to get Vista to boot properly.
There are also various driver issues. For example, Aero Glass does not work with the usual Intel 945GM drivers, so one must use the Intel Lakeport WDDM drivers instead. Furthermore, sound does not seem to work properly with the Sigmatel drivers. Wired and wireless LAN works great however.
P.S. As you can see from the video, Flip 3D is basically useless.
[Update 2006-06-16]
Here is another Quicktime H.264 clip, this time at 30 fps. I had to use a camcorder to capture this however.
30 fps Vista video (640x480p, 7.3 MB)
10 comments:
You can get sound in Vista by extracting the drivers distributed with Bootcamp and installing these manually.
On a Windows XP machine, just open the command line utility (run, cmd) and execute the command:
“Install Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP.exe” /A /v
This will allow you to create a folder of all the drivers so you can then install them on your vista machine.
Thanks, but I have tried that already. All that does for me is create an .MSI file that I can't launch.
They need to make it so that you can click one button and run OSX, and click another and run windows. Booting up into a desired OS is the horrible way of doing this. I often have to go between Mac and Windows OS so having to do work, save it on an external drive, boot up windows and do work takes 2-3x as long.
Well, I tried that "Install..." /A /v again and this time it worked.
I installed the Sigmatel driver manually, and now the sound works fine.
Great, thx.
The first time I tried that my computer just hung. And I dunno why it gave me an .MSI file last time. Perhaps I just had the suffixes wrong, or in the wrong case.
I'm impressed that the MB can run Vista really well, with IE graphics! Also you had the video running in the background and the little thumbnail came up and it was playing it twice, and both looked acceptable. I'm gonna have to sit down now, methinks...
.msi is the microsoft installer file extension. MSI's are "better/newer" installers generally.
I just installed Vista RC1 on my macbook (black w/ 1gb), the installation was easy peasy, i just removed the 200mb partition and it booted right up. Also the graphics adapter drivers work right out of the box and with full aero glass too. Great.
However, the sound will not work, since my vista refuses to install the extracted sigmatel drivers for some reason.
Id also like to know has anyone found a way to use the secondary click on the macbook trackpad as you can in os x (using two fingers on the trackpad while clicking the button that is) ?
Any ideas on the camera?
Thanks in advance
/Timo
Wow, what was that background music in the first video... it's totally hilarious... it's great!!!
What's the title?
Don't know the title but it was a musical number from the Muppets Show.
Thanks for this blog posst
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