Well, I got a 15" MacBook Pro on Saturday, grabbed RC2 a few days later, grabbed RC2 of Parallels right after that, installed Parallels, installed Vista RC2 into Parallels and was amazed at the speed. Then I thought, why not see what this MBP can do with Vista natively.
So I grabbed Boot Camp, installed it, partitioned the drive, rebooted, did the Vista RC2 install, and was absolutely floored beyond words at how fast Vista has become over time. The latest RC2 build is lightyears beyond Beta 2 and any others.
It's ridiculously fast running natively on this MBP - I should note that I have 2GB of RAM, that was the first thing I bought for the MBP (even before I bought the MBP itself I had the RAM ready to install). I'm still using the stock 80GB SATA 5400 rpm drive also; looking for the best price right now on the Hitachi 160GB SATA 5400 rpm drive with perpendicular recording, it's about $200 from what I can tell presently.
But as far as running Vista, Parallels can do it magnificently - just no 3D support for Aero. The basic OS flies, it seems almost like native speed in some respects. Running it natively directy off the hard drive with Boot Camp just makes it that much faster with full 3D support.
Aero is pretty cool when you play around with it. Alt+Tab brings up the 3D window views now, and windows zoom in and out when you open/close them.
I've been a Windows user for as long as Microsoft has been producing it, a beta tester for over 20 years and I've used nearly every build of every OS they've produced so far. While Vista will not be my primary OS - that's OSX now - I will be using it daily for my consulting work.
With the purchase of my MBP I now have the best of both worlds - Windows and OSX - and I can fully support both products in my one-man consulting/service business.
Highly recommended that you at least check it out in beta form and then make decisions later from your own firsthand experience.
Hope this helps...
bb
