Vista RC2 and Boot Camp 1.1.1

A few days ago I decided to create a new Parallels machine and install Vista build 5744. It installed fine and the OS works well, but unfortunately (as expected, since Parallels' support for Vista is "experimental" in their current RC build) the performance and feature set were far from where they could be. I deleted the whole virual machine immediately.

However, yesterday I decided to use the latest beta of Apple's Boot Camp Assistant to create a new partition on my MacBook Pro and install this build of Vista on that.  

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

You'd never know that this build of Vista was running on Mac hardware. The performance was outstanding. The graphics card was easily able to handle all the "advanced" visuals that Vista had to offer, and there wasn't a single error during setup or (so far) running Vista itself.

I'm not sure whether I'll use Vista until deep in to next year (unless one of my talks depends on it), but it's nice to know that when the need does present itself, my rock-solid MacBook Pro can run it like it ain't no big thing.

My opinion is that for the foreseeable future (read: until Q4 2007 or so) there will be no software package released that:

a) won't run on XP (or Server 2003)
b) offers exciting (and enticing) enough features to warrant the move to Vista.

By that time Vista SP1 or SP2 will be out, and hopefully enough of the really annoying things will be addressed. Until that time (at least), however, I'm more than happy to stay with (and rely on) OS X, particularly with Leopard on the horizon. A thorough review of Vista (by yours truly) will appear in the next several weeks, but suffice it to say that I'm more  interested in what Microsoft is able to achieve with Vista in SP1 and SP2 rather than the initial release.