So I’m in San Francisco last week, getting ready for the Bay.NET user group and going over the presentation when my lovely, hateful, major POS Alienware Area 51m (that cost me $3500) decides to take a dirt nap. For the 5th time. It’s a long story, but I managed to get the one lemon out of the bunch (these laptops have won lots of awards) and the machine has never, ever worked for me for longer than a month or two. Turns out it was a bad motherboard (which they replaced after about 8 hours of support calls to their Mexico-based support team).
The fun thing is that they indeed fixed the motherboard, but also unhooked by LAN connection. When I told them about it (and ran another 3 hours of support calls to Mexico) they told me “sorry, your warranty’s expired”. I complained that they did this, not me. Didn’t matter. So – pray you don’t have to work with Alienware support.
Anyway.
I was about to throw it against the wall when my wife, literally, talked me down. I was looking forward to that… I ended up giving it to my brother, who just does spreadsheets and surfs the web. So there you go. It’s gone. Thank God. I hate Alienware with a passion.
The problem still remained: the presentation! So I hopped on the internet at my inlaws and started doing my research. I had precisely 3 hours to get a machine setup and running, so this had to be quick.
I mused about buying a MacBook Pro now that they have bootcamp (what could be better!) and couldn’t find a reason not to, so it was off to the Apple store with me. Here’s how it went:
11:30 am: I walk into the Apple store and look at the 15″ MacBook Pro, with the upgrade package ($2499). I ask if it can run XP without
a problem. “Yes”. Simple answer. I then ask is the setup easy? “Yes, very” was the next answer. The nice lady saw that I didn’t believe her, so she said “you can site right here and we’ll walk you through it”.
Come again?
“One of our ‘geniuses’ will walk you through the setup – if you don’t like it, don’t buy it”. Wow. So I did just that.
11:40 am: I waste no time (except to salivate over the absolutely cosmic form factor of the thing). It was love at first site – this thing was small, lithe, sexxy, and quiet. Ohhhhh billy if I can get XP to run this is gonne rock.
“Just download BootCamp and run it, it will tell you what to do”. Yah sure. We’ll see…
11:48 am: BootCamp’s downloaded and installed, and I run it. It scans the machine to make sure I’m up-to-date, and then downloads some updates which takes all of 3 minutes (and no restart 
.
The first dialog asks me for a blank CD so OSX can copy drivers specific for my Mac. What? You’ve got to be kidding me… i really expected a nightmare along these lines, but the Video card is ATI so I know it will work and that’s all I need. I insert the disk, it revv’s up, and creates a nice driver backup.
The next dialog says “We need to setup a partition for Windows – please use the slider to decide the space you’d like to set aside”. So I slide it to the middle (going 50/50) and click “Next”.
My jaw literally drops as I watch the partition happen in front of my eyes – no reboot, no scareyness. After 3 minutes it declares that it’s finished. Wow – no reboot, no weird DOS thing (yah I know it’s UNIX but… whatever). This is chilling. I click “Next”.
“Please insert your Windows install disk” is the next dialog. I don’t have it with me, but the nice lady says “Just come back if it doesn’t work. You have a 14 day money-back guarantee”. These guys are tricky – they know I’m not coming back. Wow I’ve just been “Mac’d”.
So I head home and wake the thing from sleep (which is a joy to behold when sleep doesn’t cause problems) and pop my XP disc in. The machine restarts and after 30 minutes, there’s XP staring at me. It seems sorta ugly compared to OSX.
I then stick in the driver disk and – this is the best part – an installer kicks off and every single driver is installed and setup. My video, sound, built-in iSight webcam, mousepad, microphone, and the resolution is set perfectly for the smartly-shaped display (which pops up on an airplane tray and leaves exactly half an inch space at the top).
I literally start giggling and show my wife. She doesn’t like technology really, but at this she is very, very impressed.
1:35 pm: Everything is setup and updated (SP2, VS install, SQL, etc) and I was ready to roll with my presentation!
The final chapter is that I came home last nite and (aside from getting hit with the stomach flu) decided to upgrade to Vista. How fun to have Vista and OSX on the same box. It all worked perfectly (aside from having to fetch some new drivers) and I have one very cool laptop that I am sickly lustful over.
