If it weren’t for this guy, I never would have gotten it to work. Thank you, Josh Anderson! Follow his instructions to the letter, but be prepared to shell out some money (just a few Euros) to RapidShare to download the 2.1 drivers in anything less than 24 hours. Unless you pay, you must wait 92 minutes between each download.

When you get to the video drivers, here is a little simpler explanation of how to do this.

1. Go to www.laptopvideo2go.com
2. Download the latest driver for Vista 64. The site is a little confusing to me, but the bottom line is to just pull the latest Vista 64 driver. Don’t bother searching around for anything like “MacBook” or “NVidia”. That’s not how the site works.
3. Download the Modded INF (nv_disp.inf)  file on the same page as your driver. After extracting the driver, place the INF file in the driver directory.
4. Now do the install.

OK, now to the inane answer of what software I put on my virgin system, because that’s what everyone really wants to know, right? OK, in order:

1. Vista 64 Ultimate + Service packs and drivers
2. Input Remapper (to control fan speed under Vista. The Mac runs hot otherwise.)
3. Launchy
4. MS Office 2007 Ultimate
5. Virtual PC 2007 SP1
6. Live Writer CTP
7. Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite
8. ReSharper (but I’d really like to try CodeRush, hint, hint, Mark)
9. SQL Server Developer + SSMS
10. TortoiseSVN + SvnBridge for Team Foundation Server

For my MacBook Pro, this is a 2 step process because there are 2 operating systems at play when using BootCamp.

1. Silence Windows
   This is easy enough. Just go to the sounds applet and uncheck the “Play Windows Startup Sound” checkbox.
2. Silence the Mac
   The Mac plays a startup sound even when I am booting into Windows. Aargh! And stopping this is not so easy.

Silencing the Mac

This one is yet another example of Apple trading functionality for simplicity. There is no out-of-the-box way to do this in OSX. Download this Preference Pane add-in for OSX and install it. Then you can launch it and mute the startup sound.

So, I am running both VMware and Parallels on the same VM. I did this by using the VMware Importer. I simply pointed the Importer application at my Parallels VM and 30 minutes later it had made the VMware PC I am using as I write this post in Live Writer. Not too shabby.

That said, the importer application will not create a Fusion VM from a Windows Virtual PC VHD, which is what I wish it would do. For that, you must download a different application, which installs on the machine you want to turn into a VM for Fusion and it builds itself. Parallels also has an application that does this, an both work the same way.

This is my most frequent way to get a VM onto my Mac, create one from a pre-existing physical box or a Virtual PC VM. It would be nice if either vendor would make a Mac VM out of the PC one by simply operating on the VHD file, but not at this time.

Advantage: None.

Neither VM application will let me use the extra buttons on my MS Explorer track ball, because they both emulate a PS2 mouse driver to connect through to the mouse.

Advantage: None.

In Unity mode, Cohesion in Parallels, my favorite windows app, RocketDock, looks very pixelated and is pretty chopped up. In parallels, it looks great. This isn’t a big deal in an of itself, but the implication is the graphics are somewhat choppy coming across the OS boundary.

Advantage: Parallels

While in Unity mode, there is a menu item for Applications, which works like the start menu in Windows, only a little better. In Parallels, the Windows start menu and whole lower menu bar show up right on your Mac desktop. The difference is simply a matter of personal preference, as the functionality is exactly the same. I personally like VM Ware’s execution of this feature.

Advantage: VMware, but subjective

What about the important stuff? What about performance? Reliability?

I have no way of knowing (at least I am not aware) of how to measure the actual performance of the 2 VMs while they are spooled up. I guess I could test them by timing a run of some application, but this is a little beyond me caring. I will say that the Fusion VM seems slower. This is totally unscientific, though. I almost feel uncomfortable writing it, because it may not be true. It may just be a perception on my part.

Advantage: None.

Here’s one: VMware has one file that represents the VM. Nice. I wish the other VM manufacturers had this instead of the myriad of little nugget files that they spawn off.

Advantage: VMware

Size on my Mac disc for the Parallels hard drive: 27.7G. Size for the entire VMware virtual machine: 24.4G.

Advantage: VMware

VMware has support for 64 bit operating systems. Parallels doesn’t. Yet.

Advantage VMware

Conclusion? Not really.

So what will I run with? I am not sure yet. It is pretty difficult to find an advantage other than the 64 bit OS support. Feature parity between the two is almost scary equitable. I guess it’s a tight race. Both solutions will obviously do a good job. With VMware’s penetration into the enterprise space, I am sure they will sell more licenses simply because people will have good interop with their corporate environment. Parallels isn’t a big name in the enterprise space at this time, although they are making inroads.

They are very comparable on price point, too.

The one thing that would sway me in a particular direction is the ability to dynamically re-size a VM’s hard drive without too much pain. This is a nightmare in MS Virtual PC. Parallels provides a 3rd party utility that does it for you when you buy the $100 Premium version. This is good, but I would rather just have that baked in to the base product.

I cannot find similar functionality in Fusion. Maybe someone from VMware would chime in here to let us know wassup wit dat? Maybe it’s there and I can’t find it?

If I find anything truly differentiating in either product I will blog on it, but for now both suit my needs fine.

I am taking a 10 hour per day course this week on WCF and WF. I saw this as an opportunity to force myself to use my Mac to write code and to play with some features I knew were there but didn’t grok. So, I am spending my time sitting next to Sir Macalot, Matt Berther, so that he can tell me things like, "you need to remap that key," or "download this killer thingy bobber."

It is working. I am falling in love all over again. This time with Parallels and OSX running my Windows environments instead of Boot Camp. Frankly, Boot Camp has never worked 100% with the driver issues I encountered and the funkiness of the Mac CMD key. I forked over my $80 and bought Parallels and removed my Boot Camp partition of Windows.

I am a much happier camper and the experience of dedicating an OSX Spaces space to my Vista VM is just awesome. AWESOME! It’s really like having several computers in the same box, finally. Lots of VM and switch ports pretend to offer this capability, but this is the first time I have ever actually been able to get that feeling of complete and total integration of more than one machine under my keyboard.

Bottom line, Parallels rocks. Hard.

I then have another space dedicated to my remote control of a VM in our cloud. Connectivity provided by Remote Desktop Connection for Intel Mac (Mac software from Microsoft). This is just pure butter. The performance of the VM is stellar and I can actually code in there with little to no lag.

So, here I sit, writing this post in my Vista VM, while making sweet, sweet love to my Mac Book Pro. Did I mention that the keyboard is still bugging me?

I love the form factor, and I love the lightness, and I love the display, and I hate the keyboard layout. Guess what? It wans’t made for Windows. Weird, eh?

You want it? Here’s the deal, I will trade you for a comparably priced and featured Windows laptop or you can up-trade for some cash along with it. Yes, I could just sell it, but what fun would that be? Let’s see how this works first.

You get:

MacBook Pro, 17-inch, 2.4GHz
2GB 667 DDR2 – 2×1GB SO-DIMMs (Upgraded to 4G aftermarket)
Accessory Kit
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS – U.S. English
MacBook Pro 17-inch High-Resolution Widescreen Display
160GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm

I added:

• Sweet red MacBook protector/condom thingy $40 (plus a Windows decal)
• Black silicon keyboard protector ($25)
• Suede wrist wrests (awesome). ($15)
• 4G RAM ($140)
• Firewire 800 cable ($25)

I want:

• 17″, high quality display
• 4G RAM
• Control key on the bottom left, not function key
• N and G wireless
• Arrow keys, page up and down
• I don’t care what it weighs
• A hard drive that is at least 7200RPM.
• Firewire 800 would be nice, 400 a must
• A chip (or 2) that is just the bananas

So, what do you have? And yes, I am serious.

macbook @ elegantcode.com

I use Boot Camp to dual boot the machine between Windows and Leopard. I spend 10 sessions in Vista for every 1 session in Leopard.

The Mac has the best display I have ever seen on a laptop. It is gorgeous. It has the cleanest form factor of any piece of hardware I have ever owned. It is light. It is fast.

I carry a keyboard with me to do coding demos in public because the keyboard layout is tailored for Mac and cutting and pasting in Windows ties my fingers in knots.

I cannot get a full compliment of drivers for Vista 64 that will drive the machine to its fullest, so I run Vista 32, leaving 1G of RAM on the table unused.

I even use Audacity in Windows to publish the Elegant Code Cast, so I don’t use the multimedia love of the Mac.

So, what’s the bottom line? Did I make the right choice?

No. There are too many other decent hardware form factors out there on which I could love the keyboard and get my 4G of RAM. They are heavier machines than this one. They are often louder.

They are, however, more practical.

Duh.

And to think this came from Apple. Well, RealTek, actually.

Seriously, though. Let’s take a lesson from this. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. My wife reminds me of this frequently so I admit to being guilty of this from time to time. Like the bed I made for us when we were first married. It was solidly constructed of 2X4s and drywall screws.

Most thought leaders around elegant design agree that simple solutions often add more value. Is this simple? Is it valuable?  Personally, I find it more distracting than valuable. I would love to have an opportunity to speak with the product manager who okayed this feature into the product.

Elegant design often means walking away.

One reason I wanted to run my development environment in VMs is to be able to easily back out to a last known good image. I can achieve similar functionality using Vista’s Backup and Recover Center and that means I can safely install questionable software to my home Vista OS and still get back to a good state.

That said, I can still use Parallels Transporter (awesome) to create Parallels VMs of my base Vista OS and run that as a VM on the Mac side.

Or I can simply use Microsoft Virtual PC to run virtual images under Vista. I still have 3G of RAM being addressed, after all. The performance comparisons I have read put the two VM technologies neck and neck.

Or I could…

Or…

Wow, this virtual stuff is cool, huh?

At the time of this writing, I am sadly using my MacBook Pro (MBP) running Vista x32, which is addressing only 3 of my available 4G of aftermarket RAM.

The attempt to install Vista 64 went swimmingly all through the Boot Camp process until some of the drivers failed to install properly. It turns out the incompatible drivers were for the both wireless and Ethernet network devices and the iSight built in camera on the MBP. While I can easily live without the trick camera in the laptop lid, I cannot function without network access.

A quick trip to the web (running OS X) revealed that although people were running Vista x64, few were doing so flawlessly. Although most of the problems I read from others trying to install Vista64 on their MBPs were regarding the ATI and video drivers, I experienced none of those issues. My screen looked great.

I hope Apple releases drivers for 64 bit Vista simply because it is frustrating to be unable to address that last 1G of RAM. Frankly, that is my one and only reason for wanting the OS.

I am running Vista 64 on my Dell and have actually run into a few issues installing software on the system, and I don’t need it for development projects. I am looking for the extra RAM for running VMs in Virtual PC. Although Parallels is great, I want to run the VMs released by MS to the development community.

I’m sure drivers will get out there. As soon as they do, I will be there with bells on. I should add that the installation of Vista x32 via Boot Camp was flawless.

After the Leopard install finishes I will partition the drive with Boot Camp and get on with the Windows install.

Unfortunately, I may have to wait until tomorrow to finish everything since I have 4 little trick-or-treaters that don’t grok why daddy just grunts when asked if it is time to go out yet.