Win7 on MacBookAIR

So let’s make a short review about a laptop that is not very well-known in our country among the normal people, not that the whole MAC concept is…

The Mac in question is the old MacBookAIR (not the new 11” model) with a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz processor, 2Gb of RAM and a 120GB SSD hard disk .

So it happened that a client of mine asked me to install Windows OS on it because he wanted a light weight laptop to carry arround but he didn’t want to have anything to do with the Mac OS… although I consider this a blasphemy, I did it because I always do what my customers ask me to 🙂

So I did a little research and got on with it. First I must say that even if Mac is supplying you with BootCamp for partitioning your disk, it doesn’t make the new disk partition ready for a Windows installation. So after partitioning your drive you must format is NTFS from the Windows setup menu. Another inconvenient is that you can not make 2 partition tu use under Windows like I use to, one for the OS and other one for my data. This is because if you sum up the system reserved partition, the Mac OS and the Windows system partition, you reach the number of partitions allowed to creat on one drive 🙁

Moving on, let’s go to the part when Win is ready to go. First thing I notice is that none of the hardware present on the MBA is not recognised so I go a little bit further on my research I on the Apple support site they say ” insert you Mac CD and install the BootCamp. I look up in the box of the MBA but what do you know, there is no CD!!! they have only supplied me with a USB stick that has only the OS on it for reinstalling tha Mac OS. It’s ok I say to my self, I’ll just go online and download the BootCamp from there. So I went to the Apple support page and found available for download Boot Camp 3.2 . I download it, run install and got the message ” You need BootCamp 3.1 in order to install the 3.2 version” . OK, so I go back online on the support page and find out that there is no BootCamp 3.1 available for download 🙁

This is the part where I find myself in need of some torrents 😀 luckily I found the 900MB BootCamp 3.1 version for download 🙂

Moving on, again, I install the BootCamp 3.1, update it to 3.2V , and what do you know, it still doesn’t recognise the motherboard, power management, keyboard, video card…. and so on. At least it does work, soured off…

To be honest it does work fast, probably thanks to the SSD hard drive. It takes a while untill it boots up but it works ok. A big problem is that it doesn’t want to wake up after the laptop goes to sleep so you need to do a hard reset 🙁 Another big problem is that because it does not recognise the power management, you can not set it when to sleep, and the laptop fans go wild randomly, and because of that the battery life is significantly shorten. Will all these problems, in my opinion even the hardware life will be shortened if using Windows because it can not manage the power and does not make a correct reading of all his sensors from the motherboard.

Now to say a few words about the laptop itself I must say that his main plus is the weight. This morning I put it in my laptop bag,in place of my personal 14′ Acer Timeline, which is not heavy, and the bag seamed empty 🙂 Another plus is the battery life under Mac OS. It stays up and working with the wireless on for about 8 hours, easy. I think that if you do only web browsing and dim the display light to the minimum it could work for 10 hours without problems.

A few thing I don’t like at this model is that it has no optical drive, no wired ethernet board and it doesn’t have that nice Apple illuminated keyboard.

So please, pc-laptops manufacturers, build and light weight reliable  13” laptop, so that, us IT technicians will never have to install Windows on a MAC, because it hurts our souls 🙂

These been said, I look forward to the opportunity of testing the NEW 11” MacBookAIR 🙂