I've been running Windows 7 Beta in a dual-boot configuration on my "office" PC (the PC at home that I use for doing computer work, some gaming, and application testing, among other things) since the weekend it came out. While I installed MC13 on it, I don't actually end up using it down there very heavily, just an occasional playlist of music running in the background. I use MC primarily on my HTPC and on my Macbook Pro in Bootcamp.
After a few weeks of playing with the Windows 7 Beta, and liking what I see, I decided this past week to install it on my Macbook Pro. This provided two benefits: (1) I'll get to actually use it more often for real, everyday work and (2) I'll finally get access to that last remaining GB of RAM on my 4GB Macbook when inside Windows (I had been running Windows XP Pro 32-bit on it before). Installing it turned out to be more challenging than I had initially hoped. I ran into a whole host of issues, mostly due to my setup being more complicated than anyone should reasonably need, and due to the fact that my Macbook Pro was still running OSX Tiger (10.4) instead of Leopard (10.5).
So, I'm done, and I've been using Windows 7 on my Macbook for a few days now. I've actually spent quite a bit of time using it with MC13, and I thought some people might be curious about how everything has gone. Much of this will be quite specific to my particular install, but if you're curious you can come along for the ride. Before I get started though, I say this...
I am
extremely pleased. The Windows 7 Beta is very, very nice. It is not perfect, as some bloggers online would have you believe (see the "release it now" campaign). It still feels decidedly "beta" to me in a few regards, particularly when it comes to application installation compatibility, but it feels like a very, very late beta (or Release Candidate) of a very robust and thoroughly vetted OS. The issues I've hit don't have much to do with Windows itself, but more to do with other application providers not updating their apps to work yet. Aside from those issues, though, using the OS is fantastic. It is extremely snappy and fluid. Performance is vastly improved on this machine over the Windows XP Bootcamp partition. I saw less of a performance improvement on my other test machine at home, but it is certainly no slower than XP on that machine. The same most certainly could NOT be said of Vista, even with SP1.
So anyway, in my quest to triple-boot OSX, Windows 7, and XP, I settled on this plan:
1. Upgrade the OSX OS to Leopard, which enables "official" Bootcamp support, and gives me access to the vastly improved Disk Utility application that allows on-the-fly disk repartitioning (though, understandably, not for the boot disk, much to my dismay).
2. Reduce my existing Windows XP Bootcamp Partition down to a bare minimum of installed utilities. I decided, late in the game, to hang onto my old Windows XP partition just in case and to triple-boot the system. However, I had decided to move most of my "windows life" over to Windows 7, so I clearly didn't need a full installation of Adobe Creative Suite on the XP partition, and I wanted to get the partition size down as small as possible. I ended up squeezing it down to just under 25GB without too much trouble, which allowed me to reduce the XP Partition size down to 50GB.
3. Swap out the laptop's existing 5200 rpm 320GB drive for a shiny new Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 2.5" laptop drive. The 500GB Caviar Blue has higher aerial density on the disk platters than the older 320GB drives, so even though it is only a 5200 rpm drive, it achieves nearly the same read/write performance as the WD Caviar Black 320GB 7200 rpm drive. Plus, that gives me gobs more free space (important when partitioning the drive up for triple-booting) and keeps the power consumption down (those Caviar Black 7200 rpm drives eat up the battery very quickly).
4. Migrate the existing system over to the new 500GB drive, install it, and get everything working.
5. Repartition the drive and install Windows 7 64-bit, and then get all my applications installed on it and set up.
After a few hitches and false starts, I finally got through step 5 (mostly) on Saturday. Since then, I've been able to play with the system. I did a lot of library maintenance on my master MC library on Sunday, and have just generally beaten on it since then.
As I said above.... I'm extremely pleased. Performance on my Macbook Pro is night-and-day compared to Windows XP, for everything from bootup times, to application load times, hardware compatibility, to task switching performance. Not everything is perfect (Network file copies are still slower than XP, and game performance is degraded a bit), but these are minor issues compared to the night-and-day performance differences between XP and pre-SP1-Vista (SP1 does make Vista better behaved, but it still isn't anywhere near the performance of Windows 7 vs. XP).
MC 13MC13 runs extremely well on it. Previously, I had some occasional performance issues with MC, even with some of the new optimizations, when running in Bootcamp on my Macbook in XP. They are completely gone. The only issue I've seen at all was that I had one complete lockup when importing a huge batch of files (and running Audio Analysis on them). In this case, I don't actually think MC was crashed, but I couldn't get the UI to come back up from being minimized so (after waiting 15-20 minutes) I ended up killing the process in Process Explorer. Other than that I've seen no issues at all, and the UI is noticeably "snappier" in Windows 7 than it is in XP. I don't know why, but it is... I've tested by rebooting to XP and making sure I'm still using the same build. My guess is that the Bootcamp Vista x64 drivers are a bit more robust than the XP ones, but who knows... Either way, it runs much smoother.
Using my network library over the Wireless has been smooth-as-silk, and (incidentally) my wireless reception is somehow vastly improved over XP (3-4 "bars" where I used to have 1). Playback has been flawless, and using CCCP and other filters has worked without issue. In fact, one of the only applications I had trouble getting installed was Apple Quicktime, but more on that in a bit.
Taskbar and Explorer:For non-MC related things, I'm also quite pleased. I really like the new Windows Explorer interface (and, BTW, I hated the Vista changes). The new "libraries" feature is very slick. It almost makes using Windows Explorer to find things not painful, which is quite a task! I love the fact that even on a triple-boot system (with three different "my documents" folders and three different "shared documents" folders) there is one place I can go and easily see ALL of my documents without having to worry much about it. I suspect this will get even better if you have a whole network full of Windows 7 machines set up in a homegroup, but I haven't gotten there yet.
I love the new "steal the good from the OSX dock without the bad" Taskbar. Btw, on this point, I really think
Paul Thurrott is far too married to the "old way" of task management. Many of his statements of "fact" about the right way vs. the "wrong" way are based on UI decisions that were made long ago when computers had far fewer resources. For example, if an application comes up nearly instantaneously, and doesn't consume many resources (of which I have in abundant supply) when running in the background, then why do I need to care very much about whether an application is "open" or "closed". Many of his arguments against the new task bar seem rooted in this "old way is better because it is better" mentality. For example, he states this in one of his anti-new-taskbar rants:
The taskbar has been simplified into a single panel that does multiple things. So it's simpler. But comingling shortcuts with window buttons is confusing. And visually, it can get pretty hectic. Explain to me what's going on here, for example:
It's not obvious. Some of those icons are "shortcuts"--i.e. icons representing applications that are not, in fact, open (i.e. "running"). Some of them, however, are buttons representing open windows. And some of those even have multiple windows, even though they're represented by a single icon. Simple? Sure. Obvious? No.
He never explains why you need to care, or why it is confusing. To me, it isn't confusing at all, and is far less confusing than the old Vista or XP style way. Who cares what applications are running vs. which aren't!! Isn't it inherently more confusing to have an array of identically named (and looking) icons in the Task Bar that sometimes group together and sometimes don't? The new way gives nice visual previews of the open windows, and combined with the Aero Peek feature, makes switching applications a breeze (and often you don't even need to "switch" applications as often as you used to).
Either way, I strongly recommend that you at least try it the new way for a while. I think you might like it. I was never a huge fan of the OSX dock. There are things I like about it, but there are things I disliked strongly. It is quite amazing, but I'd say Microsoft really got it almost completely right with this one. My one complaint, which has been echoed elsewhere, would be that when you have multiple windows open of a particular application, it should not FORCE you to choose one of the thumbnails. If you click on the icon in the Task Bar, it should bring ALL of the windows for that app to the front, if you only want one, then you should use the point-at-the icon-and-click-on-a-thumnail method. This one simple change would make it just about perfect IMHO.
I strongly recommend that you give it a solid try the new way before instinctively switching back to the old-style taskbar. I remember way back when the "new style" Start Menu was introduced with Windows XP... It took me years of turning it off before I bothered to give it a solid try, and when I did, I ended up liking it a lot. I think this is one of those things. If you're very married to the "Windows Way" of doing things (like Paul) then it will feel very, very different. But different isn't always bad. It is just different.
Either way, Microsoft get's a "good job" from me on both Windows Explorer and the new Taskbar. Both are spectacular improvements over both XP and Vista's implementations.
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Topic: Running MC13 on Windows 7 x64 on a Macbook (Read 2946 times)