Tag Archive for 'windows'

I recently got very brave and decided to try out Windows 7 on my Lenovo S10 netbook since I had heard so many different sources speak highly of the new Windows Release Candidate.

Initially I wanted to try and dual boot and keep my existing OSX installation fresh.  So I used Disk Utility to shrink the Mac partition and make room for the new Windows OS.  This was a failure.  Even thought Win 7 is supposed to be able to deal with the GUID partition tables I just couldn’t cram the thing down the throat of the install.  So knowing that I have my Time Machine backup handy I decided to just say screw it and blow the whole thing away.

Once I made this leap the Windows 7 install was a piece of cake.  Very little input was needed from me to do the install and it didn’t even take that long.  After the first reboot pretty much everything on the system worked right out of the box.  Video, Webcam, Audio, Mic, Wifi, Ethernet, Card Reader, Sleep, you name it, it worked.  Install, thumbs up!

Next up I got the business of getting the system ready for real use.  This meant finding a browser I enjoyed and getting Lightroom rolling.  I found that the IE8 was pretty awesome!  The full screen mode is unbeatable on the resolution limited netbook.  It’s completely fullscreen with an autohiding address bar, tabs, and bookmarks.  Top notch!  Lightroom installed just fine.  The big issue here was that I could not get it to properly import photos.  The other big issue was that overall performance just couldn’t touch Mac OS X.  Expose and Spaces completely dominates the Windows Aero switcher.  Both in usability and in animation smoothness.  iTunes also performed much better in OS X.  Finally I would say that overall multi-tasking performance in OS X was considerably better.

So in the end Windows 7 didn’t last long.  Next post I’ll discuss the switch back to Mac OS X.  There are some new tools and twists since I last did this and the process is now even smoother!