Want something lighter than a T60 - Advice needed

[kawal]

No OS change required. You can either run Win 7 via Boot Camp, Parallels, Fusion or natively on a MacBook Air 13. Yes, it is delicate, one slight drop and it will never look the same.

I ended up buying a T60p, so now I have a T60 (for my wife) and a T60p. They are both excellent laptops.

But I'm curious about your suggestion they I consider a MacBook Air running Windows "natively". Do you mean that a MacBook Air could boot up in Windows just like a Thinkpad? If so, how is this done? Also, could a MacBook also run Windows XP?

Thank you.

Ray

[ajkula66]

I don't know about MacBook and XP...that might be more pain than gain, although I'm not an expert on the subject matter. Boot it will, most definitely, no question about that.

My understanding is that driver support for Macs is rather poor in Windows environment, and that they are much happier in their own OSX environment. I've also been told that W7 is far more Mac-friendly than XP ever was...

[sysiphus]

Sorry to resurrect a somewhat old thread, but I have some first-hand input regarding using Windows (7) on a Macbook Air. My current machine is a 13" Air dual-booting OSX and W7; the W7 experience is awful. The trouble with the Macbook Air is heat; the super-slim frame with relatively little venting/room for heat dissipation is terrible. OSX manages the experience very decently/carefully by underclocking the processor whenever it can get away with it, thus minimizing heat/fan noise, but in W7, it just doesn't work very well at all. Watching a simple flash (Amazon Prime non-HD streaming) video is enough to get the fans going full-speed constantly (and still downclock the processor to the point of jerky/laggy video), and even just internet browsing with no extra tasks creates a surprising amount of heat/noise. Don't even try doing something intensive like CAD work or 3D gaming.

I've got an Intel graphics T61 (14", but unfortunately a widescreen) coming my way in the next week or two...I'm extremely tempted to make it my primary machine (running Scientific Linux/W7 dual boot, SL as the primary OS) and maybe even sell the Mac. Oh, and don't forget the glossy display on the Macbook Air either...ugh--it ruins what would otherwise be a really nice 13" non-IPS 1440x900 (unusual to see anymore, as everything is shifting to 16:9) display. If the T61 doesn't fit the bill, I've got a lead on a nice Dell Precision.

For what it's worth, having used everything from a consumer-grade Dell to several ThinkPads to a couple Macs (13" Macbook Air, first-gen 15" Macbook Pro) etc etc...my absolute favorite machine for a balance of portability and power was the 14" (4:3, SXGA+) T60(p). No contest.