So guys I'm looking into buying one of the new macboook airs, specifically the 13' with the 1.8ghz core 2 duo and hopefully 4gb ram. my operating system of choice is Windows 7 and i want to be able to use this like any normal pc if i purchase a macbook air. I know apple provides all the drivers needed for this and i could easly install it with bootcamp. I am just wondering if anyone else has done this and how performance is? I am interested in battery life, shutdown and startup time and any problems that may occur as a result of installing windows. Pretty much anything that you think i would want to know would be great. Thanks for your help.
Don't listen to the MBP users or the fanboys. They don't like us running Windows 7 on their Macs and don't understand why we would want to. I purchased my first Mac, a MacBook Air 11 with the maximum cofig: Dual Core 1.6 GHz, 4GB Ram, 128GB SSD. All I can say is that this is the best Windows 7 laptop I have ever used. It is FAST and the battery life is only about 30 minutes less than what you would get running OSX on this. The 11 inch is rated at 5 hours for OSX and I get 4:30 consistently running wireless and almost full screen brightness. I am currently using a 32-bit version because of 64-bit PowerPoint issues (Microsoft problem). I would definitely recommend using 64-bit Windows 7, because you will get full use of the 4GB of RAM. Under 32-bit you only use 2.87GB. Still fast but much better with 64-bit version. Windows Experience Index is 4.4 with 32-bit and 4.9 with 64-bit. The only two problems that you will experience is trackpad over sensitivity and a poor Bluetooth enable/disable experience. The trackpad issues won't happen if you use an external mouse, but most don't want to do that. The trackpad can be pretty annoying. I have learned how to minimize the issue over time, but it might be something that some won't want to deal with. That is the main problem. Even with the trackpad issue, this is still the best Windows laptop experience I have had in 20 years. Hopefully there will be some driver updates from Apple but I wouldn't hold your breath. They aren't really interested in helping Windows 7 users. They want us to adapt OSX and leave Windows 7 behind. Good Luck!
It's not about being a fanboy and wanting to "convert" anybody to MacOS. He asked for opinions and he got them.
It's no question apple hardware is incredible, but some, including me, believe that there are cheaper, designed to work with Windows alternatives, which do not suffer from any issues macbooks do (like touchpad for example, which you mentioned yourself). I would be really p*ssed off if my €1800 had a annoying issue with trackpad in my primary OS...
