On Tuesday my shiny new MacBook Pro finally turned up and I set about installing and setting up everything I need to begin using it for work and play. Unfortunately I’ve been struck down with the flu for the last few days so getting everything installed and running has taken much longer than it should have, but I seem to be there now.

I thought I would share some photos and my initial thoughts on the MBP and hopefully give people who need to run Windows some piece of mind.

Ok so let’s start with the screen, at first I thought a glass screen would be too reflective but it really isn’t, the LED display is so clear and bright that there are no problems at all. My second reservation was the trackpad and how it would work with Windows under bootcamp. I can safely say that the experience is even better than it was on my previous MacBook, with the addition of Tap to Click and being able to assign a corner of the trackpad for right click it’s just much better than before and a joy to use. I’ve heard some people say that the experience is terrible and scrolling is useless but I don’t find that at all. I had to adjust the scrolling increments from 3 to 1 but that’s it.

I installed Vista Ultimate with no problems at all, all the drivers worked straight away, again people have been reporting that the drivers don’t work etc but they most definitely do. I then set about installing VMWare Fusion 2, I previously used Parallels but decided to switch, and I’m glad I did because VMWare seems to be a much smoother and faster experience than Parallels, also I find Unity a much better experience than Coherence.

Below is a photo of Vista’s experience index on the following spec:

• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 duo
• 320GB Serial ATA 7200 RPM
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB.