Windows 8 on a Macbook Air

Hard at work on my MacBook Air, or is that a WinBook?

As a consultant my laptop is my key tool of trade so it is important for me to keep it up to date and functioning at its peak.  A year or so ago I switched from a large and powerful  Windows laptop to the MacBook Air running Windows 7 on Boot camp.  To be honest I have not noticed what was theoretically a big drop in computing power.  As I live in Windows world and had not touched OSX in the past year I decided that I could happily wipe it.  I can always recover it again if I end up selling the Mac later on.



I installed Windows 8 during December on my MacBook Air and it was mostly smooth (a few driver updates were required and I had to re-enter product keys for a couple of my programs).  I got everything working except for the trackpad which stubbornly refused to find or install the right drivers.  After following numerous dead ends from various forums on the internet I finally found one that worked and was very easy.  Although Apple does not officially support drivers for Win8* I am sure the folks at MS know that many people run Windows on their Macs and made sure they had drivers that worked.
*They do now, but weirdly you have to install them on Win7 before upgrading to Win8 and you cannot install them on Win8.  This means I am stuck with my work-around using the old driver package unless I revert my system back to Win7 in order to load the drivers! Needless to say I am not going to do this.

A couple of pleasant surprises:

·        The installation is smaller than Win7.  Two days ago with Win7 and OSX dual boot I had only 10GB free space on my SSD.  Wiping OSX gave me back 46.5GB and now I have over 100GB of free space with Win8, after deleting all the installation files and old windows files with disk clean up.  So by my reckoning Win8 is at least 30GB smaller than Win7.  This is great for ultrabooks with smaller SSDs of only 128GB (too small in my opinion).

·        My internet ping has fallen from ~34ms to ~24ms.  I have no idea how the OS can impact this but it is a significant improvement.

·        The wireless speed has jumped from 65MB/s to 100+MB/s.  obviously the Win8 driver from MS works better than Apple’s Win7 driver

·        It’s still early but everything feels very snappy.  Programs open in a flash. Win7 was not slow but I am pretty sure that Win8 is usefully faster. I have yet to try to load a 500,000 row spreadsheet but will be keen to see the improvement.

·        I know many people seem to hate the new start screen, but once you get over the fact that the start button now calls up a full screen of active widgets (like an Android widget) and tablet like apps plus your favourite desktop programs as well, you realise that this is better than Win7.  For those that complain about booting up to the Start screen, there is no need to click on the desktop tile and then go and open a program.  Just click on the program you will use first (i.e. Outlook or IE) and it opens the program in the desktop, it is one click to open your first program in Win7 or Win8.

·        In practice as I usually just close the lid or hit the power button to sleep it, I resume to the desktop straight-away so the detractors who complain about booting to the Start screen are missing the point, Windows is designed to just sleep and resume most of the time with an occasional shutdown for installing updates.

·        The apps bring tablet functionality to your PC.  People think this is pointless.  I disagree.  They are beautiful full screen apps that just do one simple thing like on a tablet or phone.  De-cluttered showing only what you need to see. The desktop apps are there when you need them but if you’re just browsing and reading then these are good because they use the screen real estate so effectively.

·        The start screen has no search box – you just start typing your search and it brings up the search results.  A sidebar comes up with different search categories.  The default is for programs but you can also search settings (i.e. control panel) or files and folders.

So overall I like it and I think all the negative press is mainly from people who don’t like change.  MS have done a good job with this and I think that this will be the OS they needed to save their bacon.  Now I have a reason to consider a Windows tablet and phone to get the seamless integration between devices I have always wanted.  Once the business world wakes up to this then I believe they will embrace it and MS may well surge ahead again.  Mmmm maybe I will buy and hold some MSFT shares, who said they were no longer a growth stock!

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