So my brother just bought a new MacBook laptop. I was impressed with the sleek looking laptop. So he asked me to install Windows Vista on his MacBook. My experience can be described as”EASY”. The folks over at apple really made it easy to install a windows OS on the Intel based apple machines.

  • I loaded Boot Camp in Leopard
  • I partitioned the hard drive
  • I rebooted the laptop
  • Windows vista started
  • Formatted the partition for NTFS
  • Installed Vista

Overall the installation was pain less.

Here are the few hick up and issues that I ran into post installation.

  • Keyboard: the MacBook, does not have a full keyboard, so the layout of the keyboard was slightly different, however there are no “insert, backspace, right click” keys to name a few. I had to go and look for a keyboard remapping software to remap some of the keys. that turned out to be a difficult task; since there a few easy to use programs. I used Sharp Keys software. it is free and pretty easy to use.
  • The f1 to F12 keys are hardware keys, for example when you press F5 you are increasing the volume. SO I had to go and change that

On the pro side, Vista was flying and working very well on the instal-based mac hardware.

Overall if you are looking to pay for a laptop, then get the Macbook, as it gives you both apple and Microsoft windows OS.