Vista on my MacBook

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I would like to as well, but if the licensing becomes too much of a hassle to abide by I'll drop that software and go open-source instead.

Apologies for the cryptic and facetious reply. I was just surprised that you would actually want to install Vista on a MacBook. I guess you have your reasons. Personally I loath Vista but there are a few people who seem to like it.
I guess it comes down to what you need to do with it, as to how good or bad the "Vista experience" is.

I've heard of Vista's bad rep, but they are refusing to give me XP. I actually am in Ubuntu livecd right now trying to work out some partitioning. Half my hard drive is unallocated and unwilling to be manipulated.

Anyways, I'm going now to install Vista, so I'll post again later today to let everyone know how it is.

Want my opinion?

I don't know what you do in your mac... but Vista for what I do, is like =

Well, that's disappointing. They have a line, so it'll take them at least a week to get to it. They aren't doing anything over the weekend, so I'll turn it in to them Monday morning and then be gone for about a week while they set up Vista.

This also raises the question: Can't you just do it yourself? Or is it a matter of paying for the license?

Of course. By all means, follow the EULA that comes with your software. I'm just pointing out that people who violate the EULA by installing or using their software differently are not thieves for it. I just want to clarify because "piracy" is unfortunately a word that's thrown around a lot in inappropriate ways to promote ill feelings.

My university has an arrangement with Microsoft to provide some software to us free-of-cost, but I don't think they'll just give me the software and let me install it- I would prefer that, since I could mess around with it more and set it up the way I want to.

As far as the piracy comments, I'll acknowledge that I used the term inaccurately. But I still say that people get to define the rules for the material they create, and if you don't like the licensing agreement you should use something else rather than circumventing the rules.

Depending in the hardware, if you have a laptop that has a limit of 4GB RAM capacity, I would check to see if the hardware is 64 or 32bit. 32bit tops out at 3GB as the remaining is left to continue addressing the memory. 4GB has a limit of 128GB ( I think, or somewhere close )

I run Vista Ultimate x64 with 2GB RAM in dual channel. Seems fine, but I would defintely recommend disabling that damned UAC. "Did you do this?" "Was this you?" "Do you want to run this?" etc.. if it was that secure, there would be no questions.

Let's hope Windows 6.1 - aka 7 is an improvement - yeah, calling Windows 6.1 number se7en is kinda crap

The hardware is 64-bit: Intel Core 2 Duo.

Ah, so, Keith, the capability to fit 16 exabytes of memory?

Don't confuse the various bus widths with the blanket "64-bit" terminology. I came through a project using the ancient 386, which is 16 bit... but no... via the horrible segment:offset scheme it had a 20 bit address bus (but 8 bit byte addressable, not 16 bit words its data bus delivered), and we used 16 megabytes of memory (which is 24 bits) via some not-too-clever, early memory management.


That's 64 gigabytes of physical memory, on its 32-bit hardware.

Orwell, you were unable to get more partitions in the drive?

Most drives have a limit of four partitions. There is a way around that. Using the Ubuntu CD, you format an extended partition of whatever size you need. Inside that you can make subpartitions of useful types. In theory then you should be able to get 16 partitions total.

If thats the problem. Might be something else.

Regarding an install of vista/xp. You dont actually get a lot of options in the install. Its mostly by the MS book. It just takes time. When that is over you can remove things you dont like, or using the disk/web add extra services in.

Back up the critical data on the other partitions! There is no assurances that vista or xp will play nice. They may see those as damaged partitions and do nasty things to them.

I was using some figures from my memory, but I need to look at that in more detail. Don't wory, I understand bus widths and what they mean

Yes, but I wanted to be able to set it up myself in order to do things in a way that is more convenient for my intended triple-boot. I actually just reinstalled Ubuntu in the past few hours (much easier with wired internet, btw, and I know now how to set up my wifi drivers) and its currently doing mass updates- the old 8.04 release from months ago, so I had 270 updates to install. The tech people proposed (thinking that I had destroyed my partitioning by BootCamping Linux) that they would wipe my hard drive completely and then reinstall OSX and Vista. Which I wouldn't be too upset by- after all, installing Ubuntu isn't that tough, so if necessary I can do that later.

In this thread I was mostly asking what people's feeling were on Vista compared to XP. They are refusing to install XP, which is what I wanted, so I'm wondering if Vista is good enough that it's worth putting on my machine, and whether it could run smoothly with 1 gig of RAM.


Yeah, I've got backups of all my files and such. According to the tech place, Vista might wipe my files, but XP risks wiping the entire drive- which, again, wouldn't be a huge deal to me because I have backups and install disks for OSX and Ubuntu.

If that's what you want, them I would suggest using Windows XP, but I wouldn't see much point in installing 4GB if the most physical that can be used is 3GB. XP itself needs 64MB RAM, XP x64 edition needs 256MB RAM, ideally XP Pro needs 256MB RAM to run with other programs. XP x64 would need 768MB - 1GB to run itself and other programs/applications

I dont know. I've only installed vista once on a 4 gig machine.

Other than the fussiness it exhibits in verifying all actions, I have no inherit problems with it, though I am not the user. My Brother is. He uses Ubuntu on his laptop and Vista on the desktop and the other day, for the first time say "I hate Windows!"

This coming from a non technical user with experience with both U-flavoured Linux and MS xp/vista, its quite an endorsement for FOSS software!

Parallels+XP, thumbs up, runnning great on 1 gig of RAM, I allotted it 512MB.