Windows Vista on a Macbook

Today I decided to obtain a free copy of Windows Vista Business through the MSDNAA (nice to be a computer science student) for installation on my MacBook. Nice service, just go to the website, login with my CS account and I found myself in a Microsoft Webstore containing their top products, all for free.

First problem was that MS provided me with a downloader_of_Vista_DVD.exe. Sounds nice, but running .exe files under OSX may provide a chanlenge. So in order to obtain windows, one has to have… windows! This could be quite anoying for a mac owner, fortunately I have a spare desktop PC running Windows XP. While waiting for the 6628 MB download I ran the Boot Camp Assistant to prepare a cd with the drivers as I read in some tutorials on the web, but that didn’t seem to be necessary since the Leopard DVD should contain those already. Nice!

The download took quite some time. Anoying detail is that de downloader does not say how fast it is going or gives an estimated time remaining, just a progress bar. But some simple mathmatic operations tell me it was around 50kb/sec. Somehow during the night the download aborted, fortunately the downloader has a resume feature that did not work. So when I started the download again the speed was about four times faster. Obviously.

Installation when smooth and took about a half hour. Next step would be to install the windows drivers located on the Leopard DVD, but that DVD was empty according to windows explorer. I have no idea why or how to fix this, so I just resorted to downloading a torrent with the drivers someone extracted from the DVD. Which worked. Now I have everything up and running, yet apart from glancing around and concluding it looks nice I haven’t really found a purpose to use it yet.