Paul Hartrick dot com

After months of enjoying the capabilities of my MacBook I decided I wanted to explore the capabilities of Bill’s newest incarnation of Windows, Vista. I headed off to the local electronics playground, namely Yodobashi, and started my scan for the Widows Software area. There are two levels that sell Windows Vista, the Software level 5F and the basement level B1 where all the computer hardware equipment is sold.

On the software level they have English versions selling for over ¥50,000 pfffff… as if… I didn’t want it that bad. Just for kicks I headed down to the basement for a look and there it was, an OEM version of Vista Ultimate for ¥20,000.. righto… I’ll take that.

英語のベシオンありますか, (eigo no beshion arimasuka), or in what most of you will understand, “Do you have that in English Version”… a few quick phone calls by the staff and the answer was no sorry, OEM for Japanese only, but on level 5 we have English version for ¥50,000 +……. Ummmmm… let me think about that, thank you…

So empty handed I left Yodobashi to do more research..turns out Vista Ultimate can be converted(mostly) to English interface with a MUI pack. Righto I’ll take that. Back to Yodobashi for my genuine OEM Vista Ultimate that comes packaged with a Sony FDD to ensure you really are an OEM, he even asked which color FDD I would like…

So I got it all home, Sony FDD straight into the garbage room downstairs before hitting the elevator button, cranked up VM Fusion on the MacBook to run the OS Install Assistant. All I had to do was select which OS I was installing and type in my Windows install KEY then sit back with a tallie (500ml can beer about 18cm tall) in hand… … anyway it took about 40 minutes to install and Vista Ultimate cranked up without a hitch.

After the mandatory service pack installs etc… I proceeded to find the MUI pack for English( 英語) as you can see real easy to identify the Kanji for that…. it ended up being a 1 gigabyte download, lucky for my new 47mbps link that runs at around 10mbps..thanks NTT… best effort boy’s…. best effort…pfffff……

After a playing around with it for over a week now I can say Vista Ultimate runs better under VM Fusion on my MacBook than it does on a brand new IBM Thinkpad. Very interesting situation for Microsoft. If you are interested to see what I believe are very real comparisons between Windows Vista and Mac OS X then check out the ads at the Apple site , they are really amusing.

So now I have the best of all worlds, OS X, Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista Ultimate, all running great together. One OS is not better than the other really, they all have their place, just use whatever OS suits your life and requirements, just don’t bitch about your choices…have the courage to change.

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This post is tagged Don't Give Up on Vista