Windows 7 as MBA's primary OS (Review/Guide)

[Cape Consultant]

Hmmmm, I just got my first Mac. An MBP 13 inch. And I ordered a nice OWC 24GB SSD. Did I mess up as it will be worthless in Windows, which I will use 80-95 percent of the time? If so, crap, I was really looking forward to its arrival and installation.

I mostly surf and email but some lite photoshop and other stuff. Also, I will be needing to use a good imaging software, which I guess would be OK. It never occurred to me to check about AHCI mode or not.

Ah well, live and learn

[HLdan]

Originally Posted by Cape Consultant

Hmmmm, I just got my first Mac. An MBP 13 inch. And I ordered a nice OWC 24GB SSD. Did I mess up as it will be worthless in Windows, which I will use 80-95 percent of the time? If so, crap, I was really looking forward to its arrival and installation.

I mostly surf and email but some lite photoshop and other stuff. Also, I will be needing to use a good imaging software, which I guess would be OK. It never occurred to me to check about AHCI mode or not.

Ah well, live and learn

Would you mind giving a reason or so as to why you bought a Macbook to run Windows 80-95% of the time to do email, web surfing and lite photoshop? Just curious because you can do that in Lion. You're welcome to do what you want but is it really worth the extra money and trouble turning it into a Windows machine just to do the same things that can be done in OS X?

[aamsel]

Originally Posted by Cape Consultant

Hmmmm, I just got my first Mac. An MBP 13 inch. And I ordered a nice OWC 24GB SSD. Did I mess up as it will be worthless in Windows, which I will use 80-95 percent of the time? If so, crap, I was really looking forward to its arrival and installation.

I mostly surf and email but some lite photoshop and other stuff. Also, I will be needing to use a good imaging software, which I guess would be OK. It never occurred to me to check about AHCI mode or not.

Ah well, live and learn

OWC has a great return policy.

Originally Posted by HLdan

Would you mind giving a reason or so as to why you bought a Macbook to run Windows 80-95% of the time to do email, web surfing and lite photoshop? Just curious because you can do that in Lion. You're welcome to do what you want but is it really worth the extra money and trouble turning it into a Windows machine just to do the same things that can be done in OS X?

People who bought Macbook Airs to primarily run Windows is the topic of this thread. That is what everybody here is doing, or planned to do. People have familiarity with Windows and know zero about OSX and/or don't want to learn a new OS.

[HLdan]

Originally Posted by aamsel

People who bought Macbook Airs to primarily run Windows is the topic of this thread. That is what everybody here is doing, or planned to do. People have familiarity with Windows and know zero about OSX and/or don't want to learn a new OS.

I know what the topic of the thread is and that didn't actually answer the question completely but thanks. Why are appearing so defensive? You've repeated that same line multiple times so far. This is the Mac forum so most, if not all people here are running OS X.

[BigNerd]

I think the "familiarity with Windows" has the most to do with it than anything.

I bought my MBA 13 to use it with Win7 but the trackpad losing functionality, reboot issues and lower battery life had me using OSX more. While I primarily use it for Internet surfing (yeah... I know... very expensive web client), if you're used to how Windows works, finding files or apps, switching between windows/tasks and actually closing apps (exiting) is different enough to warrant some pause. If not for the multi-touch gestures, I probably would have had a harder time getting used to OSX.

Needless to say, the amount of apps out there is (at least the common ones) are readily available for both platforms and the MBA was the machine of choice on my last vacation and I never booted into Win7 the whole time (I even found a nice tethering app to work with my Android phone).

I'll probably end up selling my MBA 13 to get the 2011 version and just bypass the Win7 install altogether.

[kornchild2002]

I kind of think that is a crutch that many people lean on especially if they are buying a computer for bare basic functionality (e-mail, web surfing, a little office productivity) since other platforms, even many Linux distros, can easily be learned for those tasks. It isn't like OS X is making users type pages of commands in the terminal just to open up Safari and then another 10 pages of commands just to check Gmail. Tasks like that are pretty much the same across all platforms.

Even now Windows 7 is a lot more like OS X with the implementation of a larger Start bar and pushing users to put more desktop icons down there (note that I said pushing and not making). Accessing Internet Explorer or FireFox for web browsing isn't that different than pulling up Safari or FireFox on OS X. Each program is going to look the same on both OS and there aren't going to be any major changes between the same programs for both platforms.

I think many people stick with one OS and they lean on that as a crutch simply because they don't want to take the extra 2 minutes to see how things have changed between Windows XP and Windows 7 or even to OS X.

[HLdan]

Originally Posted by BigNerd

I think the "familiarity with Windows" has the most to do with it than anything.

I bought my MBA 13 to use it with Win7 but the trackpad losing functionality, reboot issues and lower battery life had me using OSX more. While I primarily use it for Internet surfing (yeah... I know... very expensive web client), if you're used to how Windows works, finding files or apps, switching between windows/tasks and actually closing apps (exiting) is different enough to warrant some pause. If not for the multi-touch gestures, I probably would have had a harder time getting used to OSX.

Needless to say, the amount of apps out there is (at least the common ones) are readily available for both platforms and the MBA was the machine of choice on my last vacation and I never booted into Win7 the whole time (I even found a nice tethering app to work with my Android phone).

I'll probably end up selling my MBA 13 to get the 2011 version and just bypass the Win7 install altogether.

Thank you!!!! Very thorough answer and it addressed my entire question. What you said about what the user would have to go through to learn some things about OS X is fair but after looking through this thread and so much complexity of trying to get rid of OS X and running Windows in the best possible way and SSD speeds and so forth make me wonder if some could go through this much trouble they could simply figure out OS X. Honestly most of the stuff is the same in terms working around the system. If it's Explorer in Windows, it's the Finder in OS X. If it's I.E in Windows, it's Safari in OS X. If the TaskBar in Windows, it's the Dock in OS X.
IMO, there's too much similarity in both OS's for anyone to kick OS X to the curb. It's more like some people just hate the Apple OS but never really used it and just shun it to the side with intentions to never use it and that's sad, IMO. I was under the impression that people here were more technically savvy and would want to be familiar with both OS's and especially since they are buying a machine that's built for that OS. I have no problem with people installing Windows on their Mac, but to remove OS X and run Windows primarily, especially for common web surfing and email is a bit disturbing.
Your story was actually perfect.

[dmk2]

Originally Posted by BigAl

aamsel, you said you found solutions for your previously posted issues. How are you handling windows backup and restore under bootcamp? Did you find a way to create another bootable NTFS partition with windows recovery console loaded on it or are you just using a bootable windows 7 flash driver?

Same as any other laptop. If you have an external optical drive, burn a recovery CD, and boot from that. That's probably the easiest option. Otherwise, make a bootable flash drive. Note you can create a bootable recovery partition and use the rEFIt boot loader. But having the recovery tools on the same drive isn't the best idea because what if the drive or computer dies?

Also, I prefer using 3rd party disk imaging tools such as Acronis and CloneZilla because the Windows system image restore feature has a really brain dead limitation: It will only restore an image to a partition greater than or equal to the size of the original partition. That tripped me up when migrating from a larger HDD to a smaller SSD.

Originally Posted by aamsel

Surfing the web and word processing, etc = ZERO real world impact.
If that is what you typically do, it likely won't matter to you that the SSD is running at a fraction of its rated speed.

Running drive intensive operations = lots of impact.
If you do stuff of this variety, you will know what it is, and it will make a big difference. This drive is running dog slow on many types of reads and writes, and it is quite simple to see that Lion runs much more quickly.

Additionally, although utilities are confirming that TRIM is enabled under Windows 7, there is quite some question as to how TRIM could be working with an SSD that is in IDE mode, since this function normally requires that the drive be in AHCI mode. If TRIM is not really working, and you create and delete a lot of files, you will see a large amount of slowdown and degradation of drive performance over time. Without TRIM, it takes a full disk re-initialization to restore performance, and with Lion partitions on the drive, that is not possible.

The short answer is I think it's working, but it's hard to confirm due to all the myths and misinformation out there. TRIM is part of the same SATA command set used regardless of controller mode. IDE and AHCI refer to the protocol between the OS and the host controller, not the controller and drive. The command can be passed in either mode as long as it's supported by the OS, driver, controller, and drive. I've read in several places that the generic Microsoft drivers shipped with Win 7 (msahci.sys or pciide.sys) will pass TRIM. However, the Intel RST drivers only support TRIM in AHCI mode.

BTW, what kind of numbers are you actually getting in AS SSD?

Keep in mind that you can't compare numbers across benchmarks, so the difference you're seeing between Blackmagic in OS X vs. AS SSD in Windows isn't necessarily due to IDE mode alone.

Originally Posted by Cape Consultant

Hmmmm, I just got my first Mac. An MBP 13 inch. And I ordered a nice OWC 24GB SSD. Did I mess up as it will be worthless in Windows, which I will use 80-95 percent of the time? If so, crap, I was really looking forward to its arrival and installation.

I mostly surf and email but some lite photoshop and other stuff. Also, I will be needing to use a good imaging software, which I guess would be OK. It never occurred to me to check about AHCI mode or not.

Ah well, live and learn

The SSD in IDE mode will still be A LOT faster than a HDD. However, you might consider returning it and getting a different SSD.

Performance in IDE mode seems to vary a lot from drive to drive. With some SSDs, you only see a slowdown in multithreaded benchmarks simulating a heavy multitasking load (where AHCI command queuing makes a big difference). But other SSDs show a big performance losses across the board. I think OWC uses Sandforce controllers, which tend to suffer a big loss in performance in IDE mode.

[finduz]

I bought the MBA with all the trouble of running Windows in mind, but the only thing bugging me now is the fn key and the AHCI.
Apart from that, everything works better than expected, so I will keep the machine.

But as you say, the dent in performance is not cool. Here you can see the speed of my disc in Win7 (SM 256GB).
I'm pretty sure TRIM works in IDE mode, so I guess I'll cope with it for now and hope Win7 in AHCI and remapping of the fn key will soon be possible.

[BigAl]

Originally Posted by dmk2

Same as any other laptop. If you have an external optical drive, burn a recovery CD, and boot from that. That's probably the easiest option. Otherwise, make a bootable flash drive.

Yeah, a flash drive is how I do it on my current windows 7 machine... just wasn't sure if the new bootcamp allows you to boot into a usb flash drive for recovery or if they somehow limit flash drive booting only for initial installation.

Also, as to why I use windows... I do a bit of tech support work. 90+% of the people who's machine I work on run windows. I prefer windows, not because it's better because, frankly OSX, windows 7, and, to a lesser extent, linux are all fairly mature desktop OS's and are all very good. But windows has the market share and it's a very good OS so I see no reason to switch to what I consider a niche OS. In addition I have several work applications that require windows.