It’s about 5pm and I’m sitting watching my son play in his second tennis match and working on my Mac.  Boy I have to get used to saying that.  This is a beautiful machine.  After I used Boot Camp to install Windows Server 2008 x64 I started searching Google for driver locations and tricks to get everything working.  After the default install I had the built-in NIC, wireless NIC (Broadcom), iSight, and audio not working.  The blogs that talked about installing the Aetheros wireless driver obviously would not work since this is a new Mac and they’ve started using Broadcom.  I even found a post giving a download link to some HP driver that was supposed to work.  Frustrated, I decided to simply insert my Leopard disk and see what would happen.  I had heard that x64 drivers had shipped with the new Mac Pros but not with the MacBook Pros so when I ran the installer I expected a polite error message.  Instead, something really cool happened.  All of my devices (except the Bluetooth hub) just started working.  Yup.  Every driver installed cleanly.  No unsigned driver warnings.  Nothing but cool clean workiness.  Yes, that’s a made up word.

Since this is Windows Server 2008 I can’t run the tool that gives me an experience index but from reading other blog posts I would imagine it is around 5.3-5.5.  Very fast I can tell you that.  I can also tell you without a doubt that Windows Server 2008 *is* faster than Vista.  If you are running Vista and don’t have crazy application compatibility issues then do yourself a favor and try out Win2k8.  There are lots of posts out there talking about all the steps you need to do to make it look and act like Vista. 

So, I’ve installed Visual Studio 2005 and now I’m installing Visual Studio 2008.  No wireless here at the tennis courts and I don’t have Live Writer installed so I’m typing this blog post into visual notepad.  :0

Oh, one other nice bit of coolness.  I installed the demo of VMWare Fusion and used it to boot my boot camp partition.  First, it was nice to see that Fusion has experimental support for Windows Server 2008.  That makes sense since it is basically Vista.  In any case, I was certain that once I booted under Fusion that all my drivers would be replaced with generic SVGA, mouse, etc drivers and that I would have to endure a re-discovery of hardware when I booted natively into Window.  I was prepared for that actually. But no, my boot camp partition boots nicely under Fusion but also boots natively with all the optimized drivers still in place.  Call me naive but I didn’t expect that.  Very, very nice.  By default the vm only had 512 meg assigned and that’s like trying to carry the Brady Bunch in a Yugo.  So I’ll have more to say about Fusion and Unity once I get back to Mac land and give the vm a more appropriate 1.5 gig.  I’m sure I’ll be shopping for a 2 gig ram upgrade soon enough.