November 20, 2010 (tech,gadgets)
Windows 7 on my MacBook Air

I love my new MacBook Air (13 inch).  At least the hardware.  The software?  I run Windows 7.  Not through Parallels, VMWare or Bootcamp, but natively.  I formatted the disk and installed Windows 7 Home 64-bit from an external drive.  Instructions for doing this are here.  Remember to copy the bootcamp drivers off of your MBA before formatting the drive!  One thing to keep in mind is that the Windows 7 installer will not recognize the SSD as a valid drive to install to.  You will have to Shift-F10 at that point and use diskpart from the command prompt of the installer to fix this.  This is discussed here.

So, what are the results?  This machine flies with Windows 7.  The mini display port works great with the VGA adapter and I get about 5-6 hours on the battery.  My Windows 7 score is 5.2, compared to my fully kitted-out Desktop scoring 5.5 and my Lenovo S10 netbook scoring 2.2, this is very good.