My new aluminium MacBook Pro finally arrives

On Tuesday my shiny new MacBook Pro finally turned up and I set about installing and setting up everything I need to begin using it for work and play. Unfortunately I’ve been struck down with the flu for the last few days so getting everything installed and running has taken much longer than it should have, but I seem to be there now.

I thought I would share some photos and my initial thoughts on the MBP and hopefully give people who need to run Windows some piece of mind.

Ok so let’s start with the screen, at first I thought a glass screen would be too reflective but it really isn’t, the LED display is so clear and bright that there are no problems at all. My second reservation was the trackpad and how it would work with Windows under bootcamp. I can safely say that the experience is even better than it was on my previous MacBook, with the addition of Tap to Click and being able to assign a corner of the trackpad for right click it’s just much better than before and a joy to use. I’ve heard some people say that the experience is terrible and scrolling is useless but I don’t find that at all. I had to adjust the scrolling increments from 3 to 1 but that’s it.

I installed Vista Ultimate with no problems at all, all the drivers worked straight away, again people have been reporting that the drivers don’t work etc but they most definitely do. I then set about installing VMWare Fusion 2, I previously used Parallels but decided to switch, and I’m glad I did because VMWare seems to be a much smoother and faster experience than Parallels, also I find Unity a much better experience than Coherence.

Below is a photo of Vista’s experience index on the following spec:

• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 duo
• 320GB Serial ATA 7200 RPM
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB.

And here are some photos of the machine itself:

All in all the MacBook Pro is an excellent piece of kit and I have no regrets at the moment in spending just under 2K on the machine.

Finally we are able to develop MOSS on Vista!

Developing SharePoint solutions on a virtual machine has always been a pain personally, my laptop has 2GB of RAM so running MOSS and Visual Studio on a virtual machine with 1GB of RAM has always been a problem.

I have always hoped that sometime soon I’ll be able to install SharePoint on my native Vista installation and enjoy full CPU, Hard Drive and RAM on my machine.

Well finally that day has arrived! Well not quite there are some limitations but Bamboo Solutions has come up with a product that makes some great steps towards achieving this.

The limitations are:

• You need to do an advanced install.
• You need to install SQL Express first if you want to use it.
• You need to do some IIS7 configuration to get it working.
• And my main problem, your workstation needs to be part of a domain.

I don’t normally connect my dev laptop to a domain as I mostly use it disconnected and as I don’t work for one company I would need to have lots of different profiles for each domain account.

Apart from these small drawbacks I think this is definitely the way to go in terms of MOSS development so go download and check it out!

Mac OS X Leopard

So last Friday Apple released it’s latest and greatest operating system entitled ‘Leopard’ to the UK market. I am fortunate enough to have a brand new Apple store open literally ten minutes from my house and this meant I could jump off the train after work Friday and go purchase a copy.

I was in and out of the Apple store in minutes and made my way home to spend my Friday night installing Leopard and Vista (how sad). I opted for a complete reinstall of both OS X and Windows Vista, I always do a clean install of operating systems just because you hear so many horror stories about upgrading.

I shared my hard drive space equally this time between Windows and OS X this is because I knew I would be using Vista alot and last time I barely left enough space to install Visual Studio.

Anyway I backed up all my files to an external drive and went to remove my bootcamp beta partition only to find that the beta had expired and I couldn’t do anything with it. This was slightly worrying but I hoped after installing Leopard I could remove partitions created with the beta which was exactly what I did.

It took me no more than 30 mins to completely install Leopard and about an hour to install Vitsa, mainly because I only have an upgrade version which meant installing XP first.

This time when creating a bootcamp partition you don’t need to create a driver disc as all the Windows drivers now come on the Leopard disc. I installed all the drivers and was happy to see that my iSight now works in Windows and I can now finally use it with Windows Live Messenger.

I stayed up until 3.30am reinstalling all my software onto Vista (Visual Studio, SQL Server etc etc) and I’m now up and running perfectly.

As far the improvements in Leopard go Im really happy, the whole OS seems to have had a slight performance increase and I love the new dock. I havn’t had much time to delve into every improvement but I’m sure I’ll find some nice new features as I work with it more and more.

For anyone wondering whether they should upgrade or not I would say unless you really want to be running the latest version then there not much you need to be worrying about. I mean, to me there is not enough new stuff to make a compelling argument for upgrading, most people (like me) will be upgrading to just try out Leopard and have the latest OS so to be honest theres nothing to lose sleep over.

Vista SP1 Beta scheduled for next few weeks

The Vista Team have annouced that there will be a Beta available of first Service Pack for Windows Vista in the next few weeks.

They have released a white paper detailing what will be included in the service pack which can be read here:

Vista SP1 Beta White Paper

Vista Pre-SP1 Updates

Microsoft have released two performance and reliability patches for Vista which can be downloaded from the links below:

 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194

 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979

These patches will be rolled up into SP1 which is apparently due soon, so you only really need to install the above patches if you are having hardware or performance issues.

Vista on my MacBook

A while back my company joined the Microsoft Partner Programme with the goal to become a Microsoft Certified Partner and Small Business Specialist. By registering I became eligible to purchase the Microsoft Action Pack Subscription which contains a vast amount of useful software for use within my company, you can look at the details of the Action Pack Subscription over on the partner site.

The main peice of software I wanted was Vista Business, so when the pack arrived yesterday I promptly search for the Vista DVD. Much to my suprise the Vista disc was an Upgrade version (maybe that will teach me to read the small print).

I wanted to install Vista on my MacBook and as Bootcamp doesn’t support Upgrade versions of Windows I started to get worried. Anyway I figured I could just install XP Pro SP2 and upgrade from there. I was a bit dubious about this working but I gave it a shot anyway and it worked, so here’s a list of steps I took.

1. Download and install Apple Bootcamp Beta version 1.2 HERE
2. Install Bootcamp assistant from the download
3. Run Bootcamp assistant.
4. Insert a blank writable CD or DVD and burn the Apple drivers.
5. Create your Windows partition (remember Vista takes up over 10gb of space)
6. Insert the XP Pro SP2 disc and start Installation.
7. Make sure you Install Windows onto Partition C otherwise you could overwrite you OS X installation.
8. Follow the XP installation routine until you have XP completely installed.
9. Eject the XP Disc and insert the Apple driver disc your burned earlier.
10. This will install all necessary drives for your MacBook hardware.
11. Now insert your Vista Upgrade disc and click ‘install now’
12. Again follow the Vista routine until Vista is completely installed
13. Eject the Vista Disc and Insert the Apple driver disc again.
14. After the installation has finished you should have Vista up and running.

I was plesently suprised that Vista works so well on the MacBook, Aero works fine and so does all the built in hardware except for the iSight which Vista complained about.

The only other thing that didn’t work properly was extending the desktop to my external display, for some reason my Intel GMA95 stopped Aero working when extended other than that it was pretty seamless and painless and a credit to both Microsoft and Apple.

Heres proof of the pudding: