ExpanDrive

For the past year I’ve been splitting time between a truly wonderful Thinkpad T43 and a MacBook. The Macbook wasn’t ideal for my primary machine. Screen resolution and size were among the bigger issues. The ThinkPad doesn’t run OS X.

The MacBook Pro finally felt like it is the sweet spot of the product cycle. All of the major platform issues with the MBP [whine, heat] have been largely been worked out. Additionally, nothing too big is on the Intel roadmap for the coming 6 months. This machine is a a 15″ 2.3ghz Core2. It is VERY fast. Noticably faster than my 2.0ghz Core duo iMac. Also, it can run 64 bit code, when the time comes. Since this machine is my primary Windows and OS X environment, I knew I needed to finally make the leap and move onto Vista for day to day Windows development. Getting Vista to run was a bit of a pain — here is where I turned to get it going…

Basic steps for getting the drivers installed are here and the 3rd post in this insanely mac forum thread was quite useful getting the touchpad working. Other than tap to click not working, the biggest outstanding issue for me is that the mouse stops working when the machine wakes up from sleep. Annoying, Painful. For now, my solution is a shortcut pinned to the start menu, which you can easily log in and get to without much work. You’ll first need to download Devcon, and make a shortcut to it that runs:

devcon restart “USB\VID_05AC&PID_021A&MI_01″

Another tool that I highly recommend, even for an XP install, is appropriately called Input Remapper. It allows you to bind command key to CTRL, among other things — much easier to transition back and forth between Windows and OS X. Hopefully, once Leopard is released and bootcamp is final, none of this will be an issue anymore. Until then…