A few weeks ago I took the plunge and installed the Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 on most of my home computers - on the Mac Pro, on the iMac, on the Dell notebook, on the Dell Precision Workstation, the Sony VAIO notebooks, and even some old Pentium III class machines. In almost all cases, I took a live Windows XP installation and did an in-place upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate. On some of the machines (such as the Mac Pro) where I had multiple hard drives installed, I did a clean install to a separate disk drive.
The picture below says it all. The big 30-inch screen is actually the Mac Pro running Vista natively through Boot Camp 1.1. I took the stock 2.66 GHz Mac Pro which came pre-installed with Mac OS X 10.4 and dropped three additional SATA disk drives (including one of the new 750 GB Seagate drives, $379 at Fry's, s-w-e-e-t!) onto which I installed Mac OS X 10.5 beta, Windows XP SP2, and 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate RC1 respectively.
Vista runs BEAUTIFULLY on the Mac Pro right out of the box. After futzing with the XP hack for the iMac back in February, and then with Boot Camp 1.0 on both my iMac and a MacBook Pro, I didn't expect things to go smoothly. Windows XP as expected, didn't find all the device drivers automatically and needed drivers from the Boot Camp CD. Also, Windows XP switches off hard disk DMA on the Mac Pro, which leads to both performance issues and fan noise issues due to the heat generated by running hard disks in PIO polling mode, burning a lot of CPU cycles. Vista however "just worked". Hard disk automatically configured in DMA mode. The nVidia 7300GT video card configured nicely on both monitors (the second monitor, a 20-inch Dell widescreen is just to the left of the screen) in the "Aero Glass" mode. Of all the machines I've put Vista on this year so far, it was the least painful experience. I've got four operating systems on this Mac Pro and am able to nicely QUAD-BOOT between Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X 10.5, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. And Vista runs better than XP on it.
Having gutted half a dozen of my PCs this summer, the Mac Pro has now become my main desktop PC. I would highly recommend it to anyone for running Windows Vista on. As I do the 20-inch iMac. I have not yet broken down and purchased the new Core 2 based 24-inch iMac or the new Core 2 based MacBooks, but soon!
What really blew my mind, because I was almost 100% sure it wasn't going to work, is that my tiny little Sony VAIO U750, yes the same little Windows XP computer I've shown here in the past, upgraded from Windows XP to Vista Ultimate RC1 in one shot. You can see it in the picture above. It is almost dwarfed by the 30-inch Apple monitor, even dwarfed by its fellow Sony VAIO next to it. But it runs Vista and I actually use it at Starbucks to surf the web.
Here was the situation: Vista needs at least 512 megabytes of RAM and a decent Pentium III class processor. Both my Sony VAIO machines (the U750 and the T-series one next to it) come with 512 megabytes of shared RAM, some of which is allocated for video buffer usage. Both come with 1.1 GHz Pentium M processors which slow down to 600 MHz in battery mode. And the U750 comes with an 800x600 SVGA display, the minimum for running Vista. And here is the big one: Vista Ultimate edition needs about a good 11 gigabytes of free disk space on the boot partition in order to successfully upgrade. The Sony VAIO U750 comes with a 20 gigabyte hard disk, which is partitioned down to about a 15 gigabyte C: drive. Of that 15 gigabytes, 0.5 gigabytes is lost to the hibernation file, another 1.5 gigabytes is lost to the Windows XP swap file, and most of the rest was lost to Windows XP itself, to Office 2003, to SoftMac and Mac OS 8.1, and other applications I had installed on it. I had about 6 gigabytes free. No go.
If you're in a similar situation and have an older notebook computer that just meets the hardware specs but doesn't have enough free disk space, you can do one of these things, both of which I've now done with both Sony VAIO machines:
Upgrade with just enough room to spare - I was able to turn off hibernation (type "POWERCFG -h off" at a command prompt), size the swap file down to 768 megabytes, and uninstall Office 2003, delete the Mac OS 8.1 disk images, and clean off all the temporary files and internet cache using the Disk Cleanup tool. I was able to squeeze out just a tad over 11 gigabytes free out of the C: drive. Just enough to connect the VAIO U750 to another computer's shared out DVD drive, and type "SETUP /unattend" at the command prompt to kick off the Windows Vista upgrade process. My little Sony VAIO upgraded to Vista on the first try. Once the upgrade is complete, run Disk Cleanup again to remove the temporary upgrade files, play the swap file / hibernation file trick again, and almost 11 gigabytes will remain. On a 15 gigabyte C: drive you can upgrade from XP to Vista once. Vista's slightly larger disk footprint will likely prevent you from doing it again as happened to me. I upgraded both Sony VAIO machines to Vista RC1 once, but then got stuck when I wanted to upgrade to Vista RTM.
Clean install Vista - When you can't free up 11 gigabytes of free disk space, you will need to do a clean install. On a typical notebook such as the Sony VAIO T-series, that's easy, because there is a built-in DVD drive. On the Sony VAIO U750, not quite as easy, since the machine doesn't even have a keyboard let alone an optical drive! The trick was to dock the U750 to its port replicator, plug in an Ethernet cable and USB keyboard, boot the machine from the network, and do a clean install of Vista from the network.
Anyway, back to the Mac Pro as the ultimate Windows Vista machine, read on...
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