Windows 7

The curse of Windows 7 is that it is available in too many versions. There is the “Home” version and the “Professional” version. The difference here is professional can connect to a Windows domain as a member computer. Not a big deal. Windows Home can still cannect to windows shared folders, and pretty much act as usual.

Then there are 32 bit and 64 bit versions of both Home and Professional. The only advantage of the 64 bit version is that it can address more than 4 megabytes of RAM. Even with today’s bloatware, 4 megs is quite sufficient for virtually any purpose except perhaps 3d imaging, or video editing.

So when our recent laptops showed up with Home 64 bit, it seemed a bit of overkill. Not a major problem, but the other disadvantage of 64 bit is that it requires its own hardware drivers. Any printer, for example, will have to have a 64 bit driver. (If you don’t have it….you’re out of luck with that printer!).

The upshot is for any machine that is not going to be part of a Windows domain network…. Windows 7 Home 32 bit is probably going to be the best and least expensive solution. Another explanation is available here.

Windows 7 on the MacBook

After much fiddling, probably counted in the days… I seem to have gotten Windows 7 to work acceptibly on my MacBook with 2 megs of RAM. This was something I always thought should work, since Windows XP and Windows Vista both seemed to work pretty well. So, here is a highly unscientific description of what is working now.

Windows 7 Professional
Parallels V5.

Win 7 is installed in a boot camp partition, and then run via Parallels. I’ve turned of the Aero screen effects, reverting back to a “Windows 7 Basic” theme. I also turned off the sidebar and gadgets within Windows, (no great loss as these are already present on the Mac). Parallels allocates 1 meg for Windows. One quirk is that if attempt to use Windows full screen, there is an odd black box….looks like it could be a dialog box, or Flash ad, appearing and disappearing in the center of the desktop or any application. So, somehow is this an issue of a piece of video memory getting addressed?