Finding ourselves with some free time on Tuesday, we decided to try installing Windows 7 using Boot Camp on a Mac.
We must say that we get sick pleasure from turning a Mac into a Windows machine, knowing that it would make both Microsoft and Apple's skin crawl to see their progeny used in such a way. Plus, Macs do tend to make for zippy, though pricey, Windows machines.
With an old Mac Mini that we hadn't been using much, we began. We got a fair bit of help from SimpleHelp.net. We had no problems installing the operating system, but we had more trouble getting the sound to work.
After trying a couple of things, we were able to use the driver on a Leopard DVD (the Boot Camp program itself wouldn't run, but was able to use Windows' File Explorer to get the driver itself from the disk).
We now have three Windows 7 machines up and running -- a Lenovo ThinkPad X300, an older Dell XPS M1210 and, as of Tuesday, the Mac mini.
For today, we're using the Mac mini as our main machine. We haven't done any benchmarking, but it feels zippy when doing the basics. We also made the machine run its internal rating system, known as the 'Windows Experience Index', which rates a system based on its internal components. Because of it's slow hard drive, the mini scored only 2.0 out of a possible 7.9.
The Experience Index, introduced with Vista, offers a sort of bare-bones assessment of how fast a computer should be, based on its various components. It's not a real-world test, in which the result would vary based on the number of applications installed, the network connection and other factors.
With Vista, Microsoft ranked systems from 1.0 to 5.9. With Windows 7, the company upped the highest possible ranking to 7.9, as well as making some other tweaks to the system.
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