Subscribe Feed (RSS)Geeking on the Weekend – XP Bootcamp upgrade and Vista
August 4th, 2008 by eyal | Filed under Techie. |
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Aside from a nice Japanese dinner at our favourite place for Saba and Salmon followed by The Mummy 3 (not surprisingly the weakest of the series), I spent a quiet weekend mostly at home. I took the opportunity to do some techie exploration. Can’t look at charts 24/7..
So, I did a full backup of my Windows system (the one on the Macbook Pro) both a full partition clone and a separate data backup. I then installed BootCamp 2.0 drivers, this went very smoothly, no issues at all. I think I can see some performance improvements but I wasn’t going to waste time running benchmarks. I’m holding off with the 2.1 drivers as I read online some users complaining about issues and anyway I had to go via 2.0 as a mandatory upgrade before applying 2.1, and then XP SP3, which I may not install after all and you’ll soon see why. When that was done I decided to clean up the OS X partition and free up some space.
So what can I do with the free space? That’s right, more OS adventures. I ended up installing Windows Vista Ultimate in VMWare Fusion. I’ve never played with Vista and heard horrible things about it so I was getting ready to play with it for a few hours and then deleting the VM file. But I was actually pleasantly surprised, I quite liked it. Despite the fact it was running in a VM with 1Gb RAM allocated to it it run quite smoothly.
I then tried installing all my work stuff to see how that would go. I installed: QuoteTracker, IB TWS, NinjaTrader, Trade-Ideas Pro and IQFeed. I did a full backup restore on QT and Ninja and everything worked nicely. I then installed a few other things I normally use like: Firefox, Azureus, Avira Antivirus (free edition), CCleaner, jkDefrag and for firewall I went with PC Tools instead of the one I use on XP which isn’t Vista ‘capable’.
Conclusion – not sure what is everyone complaining about but for me everything dropped in its place without a problem, the whole experience was very intuitive and visually I like the new design. Mind you, I installed Vista with SP1 so maybe that had a part in making everything run well, unlike the RTM version(?). When I first started using Vista it seemed like well, it looks nice but that’s all there is to it, I can’t see any advantage to using it instead of the good old, tried and tested XP. But then slowly a few things here and there, minor features kind of made me feel the whole usage experience was improved. Yep, I’m a sucker for the novel and MS style eye candy. I don’t care much for OS X style and design, never grew on me beyond the initial phase. Who knows maybe I’ll think the same about Vista after a while, but if not, I’m probably going to upgrade from XP to Vista for my main production machine (actually do a fresh install).
Microsoft makes nice eye-candy, but not as nice as the Mac.
I once installed Star Dock on my Window XP machine to make it more make like. It was confusing as hell since it looked like a Mac but didn’t function like one, and it didn’t work like a Windows machine either. I scrapped that and returned to Windows XP, in classic appearance.
Having said that, I’m thinking for my next computer to just buy the cheapest box I can find, bang Ubuntu and Firefox on there. That’s all I really need.
Yeah if you’re happy with what the Mac can do then a Linux would be just as good, maybe even better and a lot cheaper.
I used to be a Win XP in classic theme person. But the powerful computers of today support the eye candy without noticeable performance degradation so I switched to the Zune theme which looks Vista-ish. I’ll probably make the full switch to Vista some time this week.
“just Ubuntu and Firefox”…
wonderful… brings back memories of running plain linux machines from dorm rooms…
talk abt desktop eye candy -
there was a pre-rich text/multimedia time when a fancy graphic was your telnet login banner carefully “drawn” with keyboard characters.
navigating around Pine email still feels a whole lot faster than outlook/gmail,
and there was already IM/chat using telnet talk…
heh, a bit of nostalgia…
Yeah, I understand that you have a whole bunch of trading applications you need to run from your desktop rather than applications that are fully web-based. I think I qualify for the above average computer user but even then I still don’t need all the bells and whistles of desktop widgets and so on. The only things that I need my computer to do that are more sophisticated are Photoshop and gaming. Maybe my I’ll finally move from owning four computers to a gaming pc and the cheapest/lightest notebook I can find. Macs are over-priced and heavy.
dc – you are right, I love gmail and I’m lucky enough to use it in a work environment, but email still sucks a lot of my time. Maybe its not the software but me…
dc – ah don’t get me started about my first setup and me lovely 2400 baud modem, how much is that in Mbps? :-)
eshin – I don’t need the bells and whistles either, but they’re nice to have when you spend tons of time on the PC and if your machine is powerful enough to support it. It’s like the difference between driving a standard model Toyota vs. a German top of the line car. Both will get you to your destination at the same time but one of them is going to be more fun to ride.
maybe its a trend for me only. I’ve downgraded to preferring air co’d four wheelers to open air two wheelers.
Yes, it’s you only ;-)