gavinshearer.com

« Site Move | Main | April 12 Confab »

April 12, 2006

The Mac Mini Personality Transplant

I'm pleased to report that I'm back from the UK, have caught up on my sleep (well, mostly), and have managed to slice off enough time to install Boot Camp (as well as Windows XP) on my Intel Mac Mini.

It works great.

No, really. It works great. Like, "so great it's almost boring" kind of great.

I thought I'd use this post to talk about a few of the things I was worried/anxious/curious about before I began the install, and how they worked out. I hope it's helpful.

Installation
I honestly don't know what I was expecting - smoke to start pouring out of the back of the machine? - but the Boot Camp software really does make it brain-dead-easy to prepare your Mac for a Windows installation. At a high level, Boot Camp does three things:

1. It lets you burn a CD containing Windows drivers for your Mac hardware;
2. It dynamically partitions your hard drive so Windows has a place to live on the disk;
3. It reboots your machine, thus allowing your boot loader to see the new partition and put Windows on it.

That's it. The rest of the process is handled by the industry-standard Windows installer, and the experience of installing XP on the Mac is (surprise, surprise) identical to the experience of installing XP on some generic white-box or Dell PC.

Interestingly, this means that the most challenging part of getting XP up and running was XP itself. I had a bit of a Keystone Kops moment while I tried to locate both my original XP product key and an XP Service Pack 2 installer CD. Boot Camp is very specific that it needs an XP SP2 CD, and thus it won't work if you have an older XP or XP SP1 disc. (Fortunately, working for Microsoft has its advantages when it comes to procuring stuff like that. <grin>)

After XP is running, you pop in the Mac driver CD you made with Boot Camp, and click "Next" a few dozen times to get all the various bits and pieces installed. You do the final reboot ... and you're up.

Performance
My dual-core Mac Mini is a damn fast little PC. I didn't do hard-core benchmarking, but it feels very snappy and zippy. I installed Office and ran PowerPoint, Word, Excel - they all launched instantly, worked great, did the job. IE works great. Firefox works great. Yadda, yadda.

As a rough performance test, I downloaded and installed the demo for Roller Coaster Tycoon. RCT is a simulation game (much like The Sims) where you own and operate a theme park. The game is graphically-intensive, and makes good use of higher-end video cards and system components. One of the cool things you can do in RCT is to build - and then ride - virtual roller coasters, seeing the coaster from the point-of-view of one of your park guests. (It's awesome - if you're curious what it looks like, check out this Space Mountain virtual ride-through.)

Now, I have the Mac version for my PowerBook, but (sadly) have had to dial down some of the high-end graphics effects and whatnot to make the silly thing playable. So I was curious to see how well RCT would run on the Mac Mini. I mean, on the one hand, the Mini has two cores (as opposed to the PowerBook's single G4); on the other, the Mini lacks a dedicated video card (the PowerBook has one), instead relying on an onboard graphics chip and shared RAM.

So how'd the Mini do with Roller Coaster Tycoon? It rocked. The game was plenty fast, and the ride simulations ran with very few stutters and hiccups. I even set the screen resolution to its maximum (the Mini is hooked up to a 20" Apple Cinema Display), and RCT continued to perform like a champ.

Moving Files Back And Forth
I'm pleased to report that, provided you format your XP partition with FAT (and not NTFS), you will be able to see, browse, and manipulate the contents of your PC hard drive when you're booted back in to Mac OS X. The Mac sees the XP partition as a second hard drive (title: "NO NAME"), and you're free to do whatever you like with it.

This is great news.

My fear had been that Apple's dual-boot scenario would isolate data between the two machines - Mac OS X and XP would each have their own partitions, and na'er the twain shall meet. (That would, to put it mildly, suck.) There are times when you want to move files between the Mac and the PC - like opening an Excel spreadsheet in WinOffice so you can use a PC-specific add-in for analysis (a scenario I dealt with that all the time in business school). However, if the two envrionments are walled off from each other, then you're stuck schlepping files onto a neutral storage medium, like a keychain drive or file server. Hack, hack, hack.

Instead, I can now do work on my Mac, and, when I want to put something into the PC environment, I just drag the file to the /Documents and Settings/Gavin Shearer/Desktop folder, and reboot. When Windows comes up, I work on my files ... and switch back to the Mac when I'm done. It's simple, it's elegant, and it's the Way It Should Be.

Overall, I'm delighted with XP on my Mini. In fact, the performance is good enough - and the experience seamless enough - that I am going to move forward with migrating all my various applications and whatnot off my Vaio notebook and onto the Mini. Provided I don't run in to any hiccups with the new system over the coming weeks, I really do plan to sell the Vaio and collapse my hardware down a bit.

(I mean, what's the use of having a machine that can only run Windows?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at April 12, 2006 6:33 PM. Posted to Apple.

Comments

Post a comment

« Site Move | Main | April 12 Confab »