Since I had a Vista Full Install DVD sitting around I've been aching to get it installed just to what the big deal there is to Vista. So I decided to bite the bullet and install it. It was very simple to install into Parallels RC3186. I basically started the install and walked away and when I came back it was just about ready to run. I didn't seem to take very long. I didn't put in the serial number until the last step of installation. I have been able to upgrade the OS and I installed about five language packs. I'm in the process of defragmenting the disk and will then run Parallels compression. I didn't have any blue screens or kernel panics in the short time I've been testing Vista. Vista Ultimate looks nice enough, but also seems rather complicated with so many options available in the Start Menu. I've been using Windows XP Corporate Pro which runs very well with Parallels on my MacBookPro 2.33. However, Vista really uses a lot of processing power to run in this virtual environment. I was playing around with the interface and wanted to customize the screensaver. Only one screensaver worked (the Windows Logo). All the screensavers required a proper video card which my MacBookPro doesn't have. I believe all the Aero graphics won't work on the MacBookPro either. I've allotted 900 MB of RAM to Vista so I guess that should be enough for simple testing. When I installed Vista it gave itself about 10 GBs of disk space. I think installing the extra language packs added 2 GBs more. I cleaned up the disk by removing unnecessary files, but I decided to leave the Hibernation files alone since I wasn't sure if I needed them or not. Using Bridged Ethernet and cable broadband I was able to connect to the Internet with no problems and so I spent a while browsing around. Website pages don't load as fast as when I use WinXP/IE7. I tested Windows Media Player and played some of the music files that were pre-installed. They all sounded terrible. There were clicks and stutters. Media Player 11 works perfectly under WinXP on my MBP, so there seems to be some problem. The processor is only showing 60% usage, so it would seem it's not the processor being overloaded. I wasn't able to play my mp3 files because I hadn't installed any extra codecs. WMP didn't show any error, it just wouldn't play the mp3 files at all. I also tried to play some h264 video I had, and I installed an Intel h264 codec, but still the video wouldn't display, but only played out the proper audio. Anyway, this is merely an experiment to see if Vista worked at all. I'm going to spend a little more time testing it, but I'll most likely remove it from drive by cloning the HDD Image to another drive and/or just trashing it. I don't really need Vista since WinXP Pro does everything I need at the present time. I sure don't need some processing hog of an OS sucking away valuable processor cycles. At rest Vista/Parallels sucks from 20 to 30% processing power. I eventually would like to test it under BootCamp but I'll wait until Leopard is released. Hopefully Vista will run faster under BootCamp and by then Apple will have the necessary device drivers ready. At least I can say now if someone mentions Vista I can say....Been there, done that.
I've had the same experience, especially with the audio. Overall, too, Vista just crawls...it takes forever to start up. I'm going to upgrade parallels and see if that does any good...
Just so you know - your MacBook has a great video card. The issue is not that. Its that the video card that Parallels is emulating is a plain ol VGA one. Its not giving Windows direct access to your MacBook Pro video card. The only thing that gets near direct access is the CPU itself. Everything else is emulated.
I upgraded Parallels to 3188. Still the audio sucks in WMP 11. I think I'll try WinAmp to see if that works properly for playing video and audio.
Interesting..I've installed Vista lite (barebones version created using vLite, so no Aero) using 3186 and it works great...I think I'll wait until ALL the bugs aer fixed before I install a full blown version of Vista! Plus it sounds intensive in any form - I give it 768 to 1024 MB Ram...
Please take a look at my Post just put there today as I can't load Vista Business on Parallels build 3188 need some help if you can Michael N. Lewis
Sound Clicks and stutters Help tech support. Looks like Parallels not quite ready for vista. All sound from vista comes out stuttered as mention previously by another user. Couldn't find solution on forum. Is there solution??? Can't use vista with parallels if there isn't and so I just spent $700 on Vista Ultimate for nothing... plus the cost of parallels... ????
I am having a similar experience with Vista Business on my Macbook. 2gb ram (just under 1 gig devoted to Vista VM) Sounds works but it stutters and clicks and pops. Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? Parallels is this a bug?
Yes, it's a bug. For some reasons Vista doesn't like our sound driver. I can't give any exact date on fixing it yet, but we are working on solving this problem.
