{"id":1003,"date":"2011-08-29T21:06:56","date_gmt":"2011-08-29T21:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1003"},"modified":"2011-08-29T21:10:46","modified_gmt":"2011-08-29T21:10:46","slug":"windows-7-on-a-macbook-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/08\/29\/windows-7-on-a-macbook-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Windows 7 on a Macbook Air"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last few days I\u2019ve been running Windows 7 on my Macbook Air to see how well it ran.  I bootcamp\u2019d<\/a> the Air as soon as I got it \u2013 I use too many Windows apps to run OS X alone \u2013 but usually run through the Parallels virtualisation solution.<\/p>\n

For the most part running Win7 full time on the Mac hardware has been a pleasant experience, though not without a few hitches.  <\/p>\n

Whoever wrote the Windows hardware drivers that Apple ship with bootcamp needs to take a long hard look at themselves.  The touchpad drivers in particular are awful.  Gone is the easy accuracy you get from either OS X, or any other Windows laptop that matter.  Two-finger scrolling is clunky, the detection of two-finger touches is often mis-interpreted as a right-click for some reason.  <\/p>\n

You also have to remember to take your finger off the touchpad for longer than feels natural when clicking and then moving the curser.  If you don\u2019t the driver thinks you\u2019re dragging whatever you clicked, so you end up dragging files\/tabs and selecting text you don\u2019t want.  I know these things work well in Windows itself because I use a touch enabled Win7 tablet for my work laptop<\/a>.  <\/p>\n

Quite how Apple got these things so wrong, or managed to completely ignore all the other touch gestures Win7 supports natively, is anyone\u2019s guess.  Don\u2019t get me wrong, it\u2019s great that bootcamp allows you to boot Windows natively on the Mac.  It\u2019s just such a shame that the shoddy drivers compromise the user experience so badly.  Why should such great hardware suffer from such basic problems?<\/p>\n

With Apple offering hardware which, in my experience at least, is significantly better than the current PC manufactures, I do wonder if Microsoft might step in to fix the problems themselves in Windows 8.  It might sound like an odd thing for them to do, but there are a few reasons why I think it would make sense.<\/p>\n

1)  Mac users running Windows on their Mac with bootcamp are not experiencing Windows at its best.  With such obvious issues Windows is actually frustrating to use even at a basic level, something it\u2019s not on a normal PC.<\/p>\n

2)  Windows 8 with it\u2019s new touch interface<\/a> may actually be better suited to Mac\u2019s with their large installed user base of multi-touch touchpads than PC\u2019s \u2013 at least at first.  MS will want hardware that can make use of the new OS and show it off.  With so many existing multi-touch enabled Mac\u2019s in peoples homes I doubt they\u2019ll want that experience to be at the mercy of the driver engineers in Cupertino.<\/p>\n