Vista on the Mac

Hey, I'm thinking about buying vista for use with boot camp on my C2D MBP and I have 2 questions

1. Will Home Premium OEM work (I know about the drivers I just need to know if it will install at all)

2. Should I buy a 32bit or 64bit (I do have a 64bit mac but I just want to be sure)

Big Vista debate going on the BBC here

Heh. Been there, done that. Ran Vista Business in Parallels. Oohed and Aaahed at the prettyness for about 10 minutes, then went, well, frack, that's about it. Wiped it and setup WinXPro2 on Parallels for emergencies. Mac OSX 10.4.8 is far ahead of this Vista nonsense. Seriously. And Leopard 10.5, boy, just around the corner.

Gamers, yeah, if you can run Vista and DX10, that's fine, but might as well setup your own tweaker overclocked rig. nVidia 8 series cards are just monstrous though *shakes head*.

My MacBook Core[1]Duo is nice and sweet, and has WinXPro2 should there be a need for well, Windoze.

A TUAW blogger calling Mr. Cult of Mac himself "Wincentric". That's just way too hilarious. What's that make you Erica?

Amazing how many people get up in arms at the thought of people daring to try a new Windows OS. Why would anyone want to load Vista onto Parallels?

How about those of us who need to get fully up to speed on Vista before those support calls come racing in? I can now carry one (upgraded) Macbook and have as many OSes with me as I need.

As it stands, the Vista Business upgrade DVD, that comes with the MS Action Pack, will not run due to the fact that "Your BIOS is not ACPI compliant". Dammit! I just hope that Parallels can sort that one out so I can run my lovely Mac OSX as standard but can run WinXP and WinVista when required.

While I can't speak for an installation of Vista under Boot Camp, I can say that Vista RC2 under Parallels on a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro ran like treacle when compared to XP Pro SP2 so Vista is a big no-no there for regular work. To be honest, given the stability of XP after these years (MUCH improved over its initial release status, which should not be surprising) I can't see a single reason to bother upgrading to Vista at this moment in time.

Also, suggestion: can we talk about specific compatibility issues with virtual machines and Apple's somewhat incomplete Vista drivers, rather than just a re-hashed, parallelized OS vs. OS debate? I expect some of this will change in Leopard, but in the meantime that's a whole lot more useful than more philosophical punditry.

This was exactly what Boot Camp was made for -- what, a bootloader like in XP, Linux, and various other OSes?

The Mac has absolutely no unique advantage over other PCs in its capability to run Windows and virtual machines. The one (HUGE) advantage is that your other partition is OS X. And I think partitions for Vista and OS X should indeed be a great combination, though not for ANY of the reasons listed here. Also, if your primary interest is gaming, until DirectX 10 is available on Mac you're really better off dual-booting XP, not Vista -- that ugly old UI will only be up for a couple of moments. Skin it if you have to.

Hmmm...can't get the sound to work...problems with this, problems with that...yup, it must be good ol' windows still repping Redmond.

What benefit would there be for a Parallels user upgrading to Vista?

Personally, I use Parallels so I can have access to the odd Windows-only program I need. So, the major 'feature' I need is the ability to run Win32 apps. I really don't use much of the underlying OS, just the app. I use Windows 2000 in parallels, and it does the job, I certainly won't be spending hundreds of dollars to have Vista.