MacVista with Fries

At the moment, we are going through a heavy testing phase on Version 2.0 of the Teamprise Client Suite.  This happily coincided with the RTM of Windows Vista, so - like any self-respecting Early Adopter, I figured I should go install the RTM edition of Vista and see how Teamprise performs.

Initially, I tired out Vista on a laptop that I've had for a while (yes, that one).  The Vista RTM experience was a lot better than with any of the pre-releases, but the latest graphics drivers for the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 inside the Compaq nx7010 were still no good at driving the built in display so I had to switch back to the XP drivers again.  Even then, the graphics card only scored a 1.9 on the Aero experience index - making it unable to run with the Fancy Aero interface.  Obviously that wasn't quite good enough - so I had to look around for another spare machine that wasn't too important (i.e. not my main development machine).

Recently I acquired a new Intel Core Duo based Mac Mini for testing Teamprise on Mac OS X.  It's an awesome little machine - but the dual processor, 2Gb RAM, 120Gb HD little machine was crying out for more abuse - so I downloaded and installed Boot Camp and then installed Vista on my Mac Mini.

I have to say, the whole installation process worked flawlessly.  All the "out the box" drivers just worked allowing my to connect to Windows Update and download the latest versions of everything.  The Aero experience score on the Mac Mini is 3.4 - and that experience feels great I must say.  I really do like Vista as an OS.  I spend a lot of my time on other operating systems, and I feel like I have the familiarity and productivity of Windows but with the extra security and UI bells and whistles that previously came along with Mac OS X and Ubuntu.  In fact, I'm writing this blog post right now from the loveliness of Windows Vista on a Mac Mini.

Anyway, the good news to report is that under the RC of Java 6, Teamprise runs just great.  No security issues, nothing.  So far not a single Vista related issue has been reported.  Also, I got that lovely excited feeling back - like when I first started using Teamprise on the Mac.  It should shouldn't look this pretty and work so well, don't you love it when the "write once, run anywhere" promise of Java holds true...