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Aaron Robertson-Hodders SharePoint Blog

The Dark Side? MOSS on a MacBook Pro!

I may as well admit it, I have been seduced by the power of the Dark Side (that should generate the 5,911 Google hit for that phrase and maybe knock Google off the top few spots in Live Search! Smile).

After much research I decided on one of the new MacBook Pro's as my new laptop for work. I've never been a fan partly because of the proprietory (near predatory) nature of Apple, and partly because of the price. However, in my research I discovered that the new ones are fast (mine is Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM and 160GB Hard Disk), light (about .5 kgs lighter than similar spec'd notebooks), pretty standard (SATA drives, DDR2 RAM), can run any OS you want (using Bootcamp, Virtualized with VMWare Fusion or Parallels).

On to the SharePoint bit - I installed bootcamp on MAC OS, created the drivers disk, ran the Windows install wizard, put in the Vista DVD, 10-15 minutes later put in the Bootcamp drivers disk (created at step 2) and voila VISTA on a Mac, complete with all peripherals (including the iSight camera which surprised me!). I won't go into details, but being sad about the fact that 32-bit Vista would only see 3GB of my 4GB, I tried 64-bit Vista which was NOT so good - drivers didn't all work. I suspect/hope that the final release of Bootcamp might fix that tho...

Next step, installed Virtual Server 2005, copied over my images and then started them up (note the use of 'them'). I ran 2 MOSS servers (one domain controller with AD) AND played a little Halo 2 (eval) at 1440x900 just to see if the machine was up to it - it was.

So, I'm off the the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference next week in Denver complete with shiny new Mac!

I hope they let me in (I'll take some kiddy stickers to cover the logo just in case - although it'll take more than that to disguise it)!

Oh, and just in case this feels in any way like a review (It's not meant to!) - My opinions do not reflect those of my blog host, SharePoint Experts.

 

Published Jul 05 2007, 12:11 PM by adrh
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Comments

 

Mike Walsh said:

Doesn't a MacBook Pro have a maximum of 3GB ?

(I have a MacBook with 2GB and I'm running WSS 3.0 under Parallels which is more convenient than using Bootcamp as I can test browser capability from the Mac (Safari; Firefox) which provides additional useful information on the restrictions.)

Mike Walsh

July 5, 2007 1:33 AM
 

adrh said:

Mike,

The previous versions had a max of 3GB, the new ones support up to 4GB.

I have installed the trial of Parallels just to see how it feels, but I hadn't thought of that added benefit.

To be completely honest, I'm really using bootcamp so I can play 3D windows games on it. ;-) I expect that I could do so under Parallels too, but haven't tried...

July 5, 2007 7:59 PM
 

Mike Walsh said:

Parallels is working well for me and is well worth the money even though I am p***sed that a US company insists on me buying it through sites that charge me either German or US VAT. Both at least let me choose if I wanted the credit charge to be in dollars or Euros (etc.) which means a small saving when saying dollars ...

I have Win 2003 Server running WSS 3.0 on one VM and Win Server 2008 where I'm just installing its built-in WSS 3.0 on another VM.

Both are now using networking so I can get at them from my Vista portable (Office 2007) or my XPPro desktop (Office 2003) but during the week I switched the networking (easily) to local only so I could just take the Mac with me and still access that copy of WSS 3.0 (without needing to take my home router and wireless router with me ...)

Mike

July 6, 2007 7:17 AM
 

Dax Alexander said:

Aaron, thanks for the FYI on the 3GB limitation on the Windows Vista side.  I have the exact same configuration you do, with the new high res screen and was wondering why I couldn't see the extra RAM.  

July 11, 2007 6:48 AM

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About adrh

I'm a Kiwi, living in Australia (for the past 10 years). I work for MacroView, a consulting firm in Sydney specialising in SharePoint solutions, products (WISDOM Document Management extensions, Custom Search solutions) and consulting around Enterprise Search. My background includes experience developing solutions in VB, VB.Net C#, ASP, ASP.Net, SharePoint (from V1) and Office.

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Posts (c) their respective authors. Everything else (c) 2007 SharePoint Experts