Vista Runs Better On A Mac?
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I must admit I am at a disadvantage when it comes to running Vista on a Mac, since I do not personally own a Mac. So this morning while in my home library and digesting a copy of the August 2008 edition of VAR business, I was surprised to read this headline to an article:
IT’S NO BIG SECRET
You’ve probably heard that Microsoft Vista runs better on Macs - and the Test Center knows a few different ways to get set up.
I guess I have to get out more, because I was not aware that Vista ran better on a Mac. Yes, I knew you could run Vista on a Mac using virtualization. But as far as running better, this was news to me. The article went on to state the different methods used to get Vista up and running on a Mac, with a comparison of the three recommended software’s, Parallel, Boot Camp & Fusion. Using a simple benchmark the writer concluded that Boot Camp was the way to go.
But what wasn’t answered in the article was the WHY. Why does Vista run better on a Mac than on a PC? The only statement was this:
Performance-wise, it seemed that Vista liked running on the Mac mini. Geekbench results averaged an impressive 2,040. These are results that are almost equivalent to prior testing of Vista on PCs with double the memory and comparable processors.
So my question is this. If you have tried Vista on a Mac, what is your opinion about performance?
6 Comments
george
August 28th, 2008
at 2:30pm
what they should have said is,
“vista runs better on a mac depending on what kind of hardware is in that mac, compared to a computer running vista’s hardware.”
its all in the hardware, if you have a crappy setup, maybe a mac would run faster.
leftystrat
August 28th, 2008
at 5:46pm
I know that XP is way more reliable in a virtual machine under linux than it ever was on actual hardware. (although it still tries to suck up all available resources)
I heard the same thing about Vista. I’d still tend to doubt it, as there’s an additional layer between the hardware and the OS. –unless the emulator provides resources in a way Vista likes better…
Mike
August 29th, 2008
at 2:23am
It might be easier to answer this if we knew how it was running: was it running under Parallels or Fusion, or was it running natively.
I am not entirely surprised in any of these cases, not least because Apple takes a lot more care putting its machines together than most Windows machines.
Jim
August 29th, 2008
at 4:26am
I don’t know about vista running better, but on the mac, the drivers are written by apple - in bootcamp, that is. So perhaps they write better drivers?
Bootcamp is not virtualization - it’s multi booting. You can run your bootcamp partition under parallels or fusion virtualized, but that’s an additional expense, and makes it run slower (and you don’t want to run 3d games while virtualized). Using bootcamp, you end up with a native windows install capable of running any windows application that the OS can normally handle on any other PC.
Ron Schenone
August 29th, 2008
at 5:07am
Thanks to all of you for your comments and sharing your expertise with us. It is appreciated.
Someone
September 6th, 2008
at 2:47am
I have used Boot Camp (dual-boot) with Windows Vista for about 3 months now. I have almost double the specs on my Dell XPS (Quad Core/4 GB 800MHz RAM), however my 24″ iMac (2.8 Core2 and 2 GB 800MHz RAM) runs vista about 25-30% faster!