One of my acquaintances solicited my computer gyaan for installing Windows 7 on his swanky new MacBook Air-13". You might wonder why would one want to do that. It turned out that this businessman uses Tally to maintain his accounts and Tally doesn't have Mac port.
I tried to wriggle out of the situation by explaining that I am working with Linux as the only operating system for past many years and haven't installed Windows for ages, let alone on a Mac. But the person was persistent and believed in my abilities more than me.
I asked him why did he go for a Mac while he know nothing about MacOS and never owned any Apple product before. Turned out that he was out for purchasing a new laptop and was lured by the looks of MacBook Air. I should have guessed! :)
The guy was well informed and had purchased USB adapter for Ethernet as well as external USB disk drive which were of immense help during the procedure.
I admired the beauty of the machine and was impressed by the features (magnetic snap-on charger, almost blade-thin display, glowing apple logo on that thin a display etc) as well as responsiveness of the UI. I always wondered why Apple fanboiz are so crazzy for the crippled and obscenely expensive gadgets. But now I started understanding the religion.
A quick Google search revealed that a huge number of Mac owners install Windows on it. So many that Apple created a separate application called "Bootcamp" to assist this installation. This app downloads the required Windows drivers for the specific hardware. Quite happy with this assistance I started clicking through the application screens and at one point it started downloading the drivers. The UI for the application was very simple. So simple that it was practically useless. Have a look for yourself.
The screen gives me absolutely no idea about how big the download is or at what percentage we are now or how much more time it is going to take. The progressbar was moving fraction of a millimeter each time so it was really difficult to gauge is it really advancing or not. After about half an hour I decided to let it happen and convinced the owner to just click through the app till the download is complete and I will complete the process next day. He agreed reluctantly.
Next day it turned out that there is no progress. Frustrated I ask him what did he do after I left. Till then we were downloading using Tata Photon+ and he felt that a wired internet connection would be faster. So he disconnected the USB Photon+ and plugged in wired Ethernet. Since the progress bar was not moving at all now, he clicked the stop button, closed the application and started the process all over again that he had witnessed. The progressbar jumped to its earlier location and just stopped there.
I acted in the same way as any sysadmin in big corporation would act. I rebooted the machine and started all over again. That indeed resolve the issue, whatever it was. This time the process was initiated from zero again. The MTNL broadband was indeed faster and after an hour or so the drivers were downloaded (550MB) and I copied it to external USB disk. Bootcamp also allowed me to partition the HDD.
The Windows installation was the same as I remember from more than 10 years ago. Surprisingly it refused to get installed on the newly created partition throwing error that the partition is not NTFS formatted. A closer look at the screen showed really small text "Drive options (advanced)". clicking there I was allowed to format the partition. I wonder why Bootcamp didn't format it as NTFS in the first place. Any way, the installation continued and it showed progress percentage figures and when it was stuck at the same number for a long time there was an ellipses (...) moving all the time indicating the installation is actually progressing. Better than Mac I thought.
It was really boring to stare at the screen not knowing when it will finish.
I cannot stop comparing this experience with the Linux (Ubuntu) download and installation experience. There you see how to communicate the progress information to the user.
I tried to wriggle out of the situation by explaining that I am working with Linux as the only operating system for past many years and haven't installed Windows for ages, let alone on a Mac. But the person was persistent and believed in my abilities more than me.
I asked him why did he go for a Mac while he know nothing about MacOS and never owned any Apple product before. Turned out that he was out for purchasing a new laptop and was lured by the looks of MacBook Air. I should have guessed! :)
The guy was well informed and had purchased USB adapter for Ethernet as well as external USB disk drive which were of immense help during the procedure.
I admired the beauty of the machine and was impressed by the features (magnetic snap-on charger, almost blade-thin display, glowing apple logo on that thin a display etc) as well as responsiveness of the UI. I always wondered why Apple fanboiz are so crazzy for the crippled and obscenely expensive gadgets. But now I started understanding the religion.
A quick Google search revealed that a huge number of Mac owners install Windows on it. So many that Apple created a separate application called "Bootcamp" to assist this installation. This app downloads the required Windows drivers for the specific hardware. Quite happy with this assistance I started clicking through the application screens and at one point it started downloading the drivers. The UI for the application was very simple. So simple that it was practically useless. Have a look for yourself.
The screen gives me absolutely no idea about how big the download is or at what percentage we are now or how much more time it is going to take. The progressbar was moving fraction of a millimeter each time so it was really difficult to gauge is it really advancing or not. After about half an hour I decided to let it happen and convinced the owner to just click through the app till the download is complete and I will complete the process next day. He agreed reluctantly.
Next day it turned out that there is no progress. Frustrated I ask him what did he do after I left. Till then we were downloading using Tata Photon+ and he felt that a wired internet connection would be faster. So he disconnected the USB Photon+ and plugged in wired Ethernet. Since the progress bar was not moving at all now, he clicked the stop button, closed the application and started the process all over again that he had witnessed. The progressbar jumped to its earlier location and just stopped there.
I acted in the same way as any sysadmin in big corporation would act. I rebooted the machine and started all over again. That indeed resolve the issue, whatever it was. This time the process was initiated from zero again. The MTNL broadband was indeed faster and after an hour or so the drivers were downloaded (550MB) and I copied it to external USB disk. Bootcamp also allowed me to partition the HDD.
The Windows installation was the same as I remember from more than 10 years ago. Surprisingly it refused to get installed on the newly created partition throwing error that the partition is not NTFS formatted. A closer look at the screen showed really small text "Drive options (advanced)". clicking there I was allowed to format the partition. I wonder why Bootcamp didn't format it as NTFS in the first place. Any way, the installation continued and it showed progress percentage figures and when it was stuck at the same number for a long time there was an ellipses (...) moving all the time indicating the installation is actually progressing. Better than Mac I thought.
I cannot stop comparing this experience with the Linux (Ubuntu) download and installation experience. There you see how to communicate the progress information to the user.
thats a nice:)
ReplyDelete//
I acted in the same way as any sysadmin in big corporation would act. I rebooted the machine and started all over again.
// hehhehehe