Adventures of a Vagabond

I wanted to throw out a little info on what’s probably a common Boot Camp issue for Unibody MacBook Pros (late-2008) on Windows 7 x64 RTM.

My MBP has occasionally locked up in Win 7 during normal use. This appears to be a video driver issue, as I installed the latest driver from nVidia’s web site and I haven’t seen the problem since.

This applies to both Boot Camp 2.1 and 3.0 (incl. with Snow Leopard).

Hope this helps someone out there!

About a year ago, succumbing to envy and a desire to try something new, I bought a Mac Book. I’ve loved it. The hardware looks and feels fantastic and the screen is playful and vibrant. The OS was simple and stayed out of your way and drawn out in a way that just made everything feel artsy and beautiful. Even the various little 3rd party utilities, like Skitch, had fantastically done interfaces.

A lot changes in a year. Windows 7, which I’ve been using internally and loving since November has finished. And it’s amazing. Plenty of others to wax eloquently about how great it is.

And simultaneously, my list of inadequacies on Mac has been growing.

• Video playback performance
  Holy cow guys, for a platform that prides itself on media it’s incredible to find that this sucks. 1080p video that play fine on Windows drop frames every few seconds on OS X. Apparently, OS X video architecture doesn’t allow applications to talk directly to the video card and it has to go through a thick OS layer which kills perf. Windows has the DirectShow interface to make this a fast speedy pipe. (Note: this appears to be improved in Snow Leopard.)
• Mac Office Excel 2008
  I do my fair share of work on Excel and with the introduction of Tables and Structured References in Windows Excel 2007, I’ve never looked back. Except that these won’t be support until the next version of Mac Office, so it’s a fail until then. Anytime I need to do any Excel work I’m pulling out my PC laptop. Virtualization just causes my laptop fan to run all the time.
• Adobe Lightroom
  I love this app to manage my photo libraries and workflow. It’s one of the best new pieces of software in many years. But it can be a bit of a dog on a Mac with scrolling, opening and closing window panes, and rendering previews. One day I used a copy on a 1.2Ghz Lenovo ThinkPad x300 and blew myself away when the performance was actually on-par with what I wanted.
• Incompatible Filesystems
  Working at Microsoft and yet still doing the Mac thing means I do things on both Mac and PC, like take a video on my Mac and throw it on my work laptop for a flight. You’d think that this should be simple as copying something onto a portable hard drive. It’s not. The common file system between Windows and Mac is FAT32, which doesn’t support file sizes larger than 4GB. I’ve had bad experiences with either perf or file corruption using 3rd party file system drivers on either side, so I have to result to doing a network copy, which takes forever. (Note: I recently got a crossover ethernet cable and can now do this at 1Gbps—however I dislike the process of cluttering my workstation for something so basic.)
• Outdated Window Management
  Seriously. Win 7 got it right. Aero Snap makes life wonderful.

Earlier this week I decided to take the plunge and transition everything over. This is complicated, mainly for the file system issues mentioned above. I’ve got a 1TB external storage that’s used for Time Machine and other file storage that I have to transition over, files on my Mac, and hours/days of computer processing time importing MP3s into iTunes and photos into Lightroom.

Files
I took my 1TB storage to my office, where I borrowed a machine with sufficient space. I bought a copy of MacDrive 8 to copy everything over. It took nearly 20 hours to do so, as the throughput was horrible. When that was done and I’d verified the files to some extent, I formatted the drive into NTFS and copied them all back over in about 7 hours. By the way, it’s important that you re-create all the partitions on the drive (use compmgmt.msc) and not just format. Mac defines drive partitions differently than Windows and Windows won’t detect the drive otherwise.

Apple iTunes
Surprisingly pain free! I copied my Mac Music folder right into the My Music folder on Windows 7, booted up iTunes and everything just WORKED. Despite the fact the folder path was totally different, iTunes updated the library automatically and everything was preserved, even iPhone and iPod profiles.

Adobe Lightroom
Also pain free! Lightroom has built-in features to handle libraries getting moved, so all I had to do was update the location of the root directories and everything lit up again.

Windows 7 = <3