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PC World – In Pictures: The Most Notable Notebooks of 2007

According to PC World magazine, the fastest Windows Vista laptop that they’ve tested this year is a Macbook Pro. Faster than Dell, Toshiba, and yes: even Alienware.

Luckily, Mac OS X Leopard has bootcamp so that if you absolutely must slum it and boot up Vista (the reasons to do so become less pressing with every passing day), at least you’ll be doing so on the fastest laptop going.

It strikes me as ironic that the Macbook Pro is the fastest Windows Vista machine going, when you consider the fact that Apple likely didn’t take Vista performance into consideration at all when designing it.

I’m running Windows XP under VMware Fusion and was having a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) problem that involved the Cisco VPN client (dne2000.sys) and the VMware VMXNET network card driver. I managed to resolved the issue by shutting down the virtual machine, disabling the NIC, restarting, then reinstalling VMware Tools and disabling the VMXNET driver.

I’m back to running with the original NIC driver and now my Cisco VPN client (5.0.01.0600) is running very happily with no problems.

I’m guessing that I could probably get better performance by switching to the e1000 NIC but its working fine now and I don’t really require huge bandwidth from my Windows VM.

Hopefully this will save somebody from wasting 3-4 hours like I did yesterday…

I realize that not all of you are on the Mac OS X train. Having said that, this is pretty funny even if you are one of those “dyed in the wool” Microsoft types. Wouldn’t life be a lot easier for everyone if there was just one Vista instead of six?

Bye-bye Windows! My three-month Macintosh trial has ended, but my permanent gig with the Mac is just getting started. Apple’s MacBook Pro and Mac OS X are now my computer and operating system of choice.If you give the Mac three months, as I did, you won’t go back either. The hardest part is paying for it — everything after that gets easier and easier. Perhaps fittingly, it took me the full three-month trial period to pay off my expensive MacBook Pro. But the darn thing is worth every penny.Windows expert to Redmond: Buh-bye

I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised.

Almost everyone I know who has spent any quality time with Mac OS X has bought one (or developed a serious case of Mac Envy) in relatively short order.

Unless you’re a hard-core 3D gamer, the combination of Mac X and Parallels running Windows XP (when absolutely necessary!) is a very tough combination to beat.

How to Resize Your Parallels Drive, and Get Windows to Recognize It

Wow. This is awesome! My current Parallels disk partition is a bit on the small side and now I can easily make it bigger using GParted. I just assumed I was stuck with the original partition size.

Windows on the Mac Changes Everything by David Kirkpatrick.

I’m a long time Mac OS X user and I’ve been using Parallels technology to run Windows on my Macbook Pro for a couple of months. I have to say, even my older version of Parallels is pretty awesome. The new Parallels features that are coming out (particularly “coherence mode” and full drag ‘n drop support!) remove almost all the excuses for running having to run a dedicated Windows machine. The only real reason to not go with Paralles is if you’re really into gaming and need 3D directx.

A particularly interesting quote from the article:

In June 2005 I broke the news that Michael Dell wanted to ship Mac OS on Dell machines. Last week in an e-mail he confirmed to me that his thinking hasn’t changed. “We would offer MacOS,” he wrote, “if customers wanted it and Apple would license it on reasonable terms…It’s Apple’s decision.”

The pressures are building on Steve Jobs. Eventually, as virtualization improves, it will prove harder and harder not to accede to Dell and others who want to sell his software in different ways.

Can you imagine buying a Dell that came pre-installed with Mac OS X Leopard, Parallels, and a pre-installed MS Windows VM?