jason_nss
19th April 2006, 06:49 AM
hello all
i've been a lurker on here since about day 1 and appreciate all the info posted by the forum users. also the wiki has been great resource - thanks for all the work.
i've got a stock mbp 1.83 and have been running both bootcamp and parallels workstation since beta2 came out and wanted to share some thoughts i had about beta4. i'm running xpsp2 as the guest os as a way to avoid lugging home a work laptop every night. i only use a handful of applications under windows but they're all microsoft apps and all resouce heavy so something like vmware isn't an option. i'm using sharepoint under IE6, all of the office 2003 apps and visual studio 2003.
the initial installation (with beta2) went really easy and upgrading between betas was as simple as possible. not having to reinstall the OS between beta builds is a huge feature and i'm glad for it.
general impressions - compared to beta2, beta4 seems a lot more responsive. the application itself starts up very quickly, and XP boot time is still very quick and maybe a little faster than with previous betas but only by a second or two. the mouse pointer moves between osx and xp without that stupid ctrl-alt combo so i like that a lot.
connecting over my work VPN works every time, but occassionally the network bridge would go down and a reboot was required. outlook 2003 runs pretty well, even with the huge number of tasks and reminders i've got going off. sharepoint with IE6 and ms project 2003 works great- having to reboot into xp just to update project status was annoying in the least so this is huge for me.
on the downside i haven't been able to test vs2003 as of yet since i only gave 160 megs of ram to the virual machine. i'm going to wait to do a ram upgrade before even trying to install it since the whole process can take forever. note: i did install vs2003 under bootcamp and things ran ok and i expect the same from parallels once i do a ram upgrade.
networking, video, sound - all have gotten better and better with each beta release. audio via winamp pro was either choppy or just didn't play with beta 3, but b4 hasn't had a single hiccup. wmp and real player work great too for their native video formats as well as mp4 and divx5.
overall i'm really happy with beta4 - it works great with 5 out of 6 apps i need to run. it's worth a test run if you've got a mac and are a slave to the MS universe like i am. :)
i've been a lurker on here since about day 1 and appreciate all the info posted by the forum users. also the wiki has been great resource - thanks for all the work.
i've got a stock mbp 1.83 and have been running both bootcamp and parallels workstation since beta2 came out and wanted to share some thoughts i had about beta4. i'm running xpsp2 as the guest os as a way to avoid lugging home a work laptop every night. i only use a handful of applications under windows but they're all microsoft apps and all resouce heavy so something like vmware isn't an option. i'm using sharepoint under IE6, all of the office 2003 apps and visual studio 2003.
the initial installation (with beta2) went really easy and upgrading between betas was as simple as possible. not having to reinstall the OS between beta builds is a huge feature and i'm glad for it.
general impressions - compared to beta2, beta4 seems a lot more responsive. the application itself starts up very quickly, and XP boot time is still very quick and maybe a little faster than with previous betas but only by a second or two. the mouse pointer moves between osx and xp without that stupid ctrl-alt combo so i like that a lot.
connecting over my work VPN works every time, but occassionally the network bridge would go down and a reboot was required. outlook 2003 runs pretty well, even with the huge number of tasks and reminders i've got going off. sharepoint with IE6 and ms project 2003 works great- having to reboot into xp just to update project status was annoying in the least so this is huge for me.
on the downside i haven't been able to test vs2003 as of yet since i only gave 160 megs of ram to the virual machine. i'm going to wait to do a ram upgrade before even trying to install it since the whole process can take forever. note: i did install vs2003 under bootcamp and things ran ok and i expect the same from parallels once i do a ram upgrade.
networking, video, sound - all have gotten better and better with each beta release. audio via winamp pro was either choppy or just didn't play with beta 3, but b4 hasn't had a single hiccup. wmp and real player work great too for their native video formats as well as mp4 and divx5.
overall i'm really happy with beta4 - it works great with 5 out of 6 apps i need to run. it's worth a test run if you've got a mac and are a slave to the MS universe like i am. :)