From what I've heard, "Trackpad++" can greatly improve Macbook trackpad performance in Windows.
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The 2013 MacBook Air has amazing Windows 8 perfomance
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From what I've heard, "Trackpad++" can greatly improve Macbook trackpad performance in Windows.
Hell....!.....
even a humble piece of hardware as the HP Mini can do a decent job running W8. I never tought about a day when I praise a OS coming from Microsoft. But I was wrong.....(until now and first impression....
.....).....
even a humble piece of hardware as the HP Mini can do a decent job running W8. I never tought about a day when I praise a OS coming from Microsoft. But I was wrong.....(until now and first impression....
.....).....
e
Funny, I have heard quite the opposite. That Windows 8 was worse that Vista. Those are fighting words!
I tried the preview and did not like the metro interface. The desktop interface got frustrating every time I tried hitting the (non existent) Start button. If 8.1 brings back the Start button and I can permanently disable Metro, I may try it, but so far Windows 7 is behaving superbly on my MBA, so not sure I have a compelling reason to upgrade.
even a humble piece of hardware as the HP Mini can do a decent job running W8. I never tought about a day when I praise a OS coming from Microsoft. But I was wrong.....(until now and first impression....
Funny, I have heard quite the opposite. That Windows 8 was worse that Vista. Those are fighting words!
I tried the preview and did not like the metro interface. The desktop interface got frustrating every time I tried hitting the (non existent) Start button. If 8.1 brings back the Start button and I can permanently disable Metro, I may try it, but so far Windows 7 is behaving superbly on my MBA, so not sure I have a compelling reason to upgrade.
e
Funny, I have heard quite the opposite. That Windows 8 was worse that Vista. Those are fighting words!
I tried the preview and did not like the metro interface. The desktop interface got frustrating every time I tried hitting the (non existent) Start button. If 8.1 brings back the Start button and I can permanently disable Metro, I may try it, but so far Windows 7 is behaving superbly on my MBA, so not sure I have a compelling reason to upgrade.
8.1 is bringing back the start button, but all it will do is bring up the metro/modern interface. The start menu is still gone.
Then count me out until Windows 9. I skipped ME, Vista, and now 8. Good riddens.
I take that back. I just installed 8.1 preview and am reasonably impressed. The start button can be configured to bring up an app list. If I can find a shutdown app, I'm in business. It looks pretty slick booting straight into desktop mode. I like it.
Thanks everyone for the Trackpad++ hints. It's really more fun to use the trackpad now.
To be completey honest: after using 8.0 on this new Macbook Air, I am really disappointed about Mountain Lion.
I am running Win 8 Pro 64 Bit on a new 13 inch i5/4GB/256 machine and was worried about the RAM in Windows.
Never have I been so wrong! Currently open:
Chrome with 17 Tabs - 1080p youtube video on two of them running
Chrome with 5 Tabs - nothing fancy
Chrome with 12 Tabs - Twitch.tv Stream
Three Libre Office documents and a 30 MB PDF manual
Evernote and Wunderlist
VLC playing 1080p mkv
Spotify streaming in high quality.
Actively using Teamspeak 3
GIMP editing two 8 MB files
Chrome with Flickr bib. open - 200 photos displaying
CPU is at 60% and 300 MB of Ram still available. No swapping. I guess that's everything you can ask for on a machine like that, showing that it's still very much useable with 4GB doing plenty of stuff at the same time. However, this would not be possible in Mountain Lion I'm afraid.
Even at 100% the CPU won't turboboost to 2,6 GHz but stay at a maximum of 2,3. Did anyone notice that behaviour?
To be completey honest: after using 8.0 on this new Macbook Air, I am really disappointed about Mountain Lion.
I am running Win 8 Pro 64 Bit on a new 13 inch i5/4GB/256 machine and was worried about the RAM in Windows.
Never have I been so wrong! Currently open:
Chrome with 17 Tabs - 1080p youtube video on two of them running
Chrome with 5 Tabs - nothing fancy
Chrome with 12 Tabs - Twitch.tv Stream
Three Libre Office documents and a 30 MB PDF manual
Evernote and Wunderlist
VLC playing 1080p mkv
Spotify streaming in high quality.
Actively using Teamspeak 3
GIMP editing two 8 MB files
Chrome with Flickr bib. open - 200 photos displaying
CPU is at 60% and 300 MB of Ram still available. No swapping. I guess that's everything you can ask for on a machine like that, showing that it's still very much useable with 4GB doing plenty of stuff at the same time. However, this would not be possible in Mountain Lion I'm afraid.
Even at 100% the CPU won't turboboost to 2,6 GHz but stay at a maximum of 2,3. Did anyone notice that behaviour?
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Thats exactly what I noticed when using Windows 8. Tons of internet tabs open, Spotify streaming music, Acrobat open and streaming HD video and not a stutter. Try that in Mountain Lion and the video stutters and there are significant page outs. Hopefully memory management will get better with Mavericks.
I have the i5.
I have the 13 inch Air. I had the 15 inch rMBP before, and even though it was rated for 7 hours, in Windows it would only last 3 to 4 hours. I'm very excited with the new Air, especially because it's lighter than the rMBP, doesn't get as hot as the rMBP and text is much easier to read in Windows 8.
That's because the rMBP used the dGPU full time in windows 7, not sure about windows 8 though...
Yes - came here to say exactly that. Bought a new 13.3" Air w/4GB RAM on tax holiday with student discount! OS X was not very pleasant to use under anything more than light loads. Open Chrome, Word, Mail.app and pages in Chrome were pausing while scrolling and the OS had swapped out 100+Megs. App switching was ok but nowhere near as snappier as I discovered with Win8.
Had an unused $39 Win8 Pro key lying around - and I must say I was very much convinced I would be trading one problem for 2 other - and kudos to BootCamp 5 and Windows 8 memory management I am pretty happy with the setup! Never thought this day would arise..
Here are a few things I noticed -
- Windows EFI boots with no quirks!
- EFI install has everything working - sound, brightness controls, GPU driver even updates fine to latest Intel provided version without issues!
- Windows has enabled AHCI - not sure if related but boot and shutdown blazingly fast!
- Memory management is great - Office 2013, bunch of Chrome tabs, all the metro social apps and still half of it is free!
- Chrome tab casting using ChromeCast - gave distorted picture on OS X, but works great on Win 8.
- Something with the Win8 GPU drivers or Win8 itself - on screen it feels way snappier than anything I've used thus far.
- It is dead silent except under heavy load when the fans make bare minimum noise - and it is always cool - no heat issues.
Hopefully, now that I am impressed more than needed, Microsoft doesn't send out an update to ruin things
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I dint know what you people are talking about. Mountain lion works great with 4gb ram. It is a smooth under most tasks as my 8gb air.
Me too ! It bloody astounds me that with identical hardware configurations and latest bootcamp drivers we have these varying reports.
I find the bootcamp drivers atrocious, the track pad clicks often double down and dragging is downright broken, to start you can't drag/select with three fingers like in iOS it's either double tap or click and drag, but even with click and drag it is inaccurate and drops lock. Overall a subpar trackpad experience, worse than on a cheapo wintel notebook.
My wi-fi doesn't work in Windows, all drivers installed fine and it connects to network but states that connection is limited and its broken, so can't get the net.
The brightness has a mind of its own and sometimes fluctuates frequently for no reason.
Overall I am in hell when in Windows on the new MacBook 2013.
One thing that is positive though is that text appears to be much sharper, less fuzzy and way better to read than in OSX. Colors appear with better contrast too.
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I brought my macbook air to put windows on it. Windows 8 works very well on macbook so well that deleted the osx partition.
+ WiFi is fast and doesn't drop (reason I rid of my sony pro 13 connects to my works WiFi, my home, my parents, schools and buddies WiFi flawless)
+Battery Life 12 hours
+Low Resources (Ram)
+ Brightness works
+ Trackpad works as should in native windows including right click (Trackpad +++ sucks )
+ Windows updates fine plus all newest intel drivers
+ No freezes no crashes no blue screens
+All my programs run flawless including Cloud Station (basically my own dropbox/ Google drive) Office 2013 has been flawless.. Team viewer runs great. All my CAD/CAM programs run fast and smooth.
+ WiFi is fast and doesn't drop (reason I rid of my sony pro 13 connects to my works WiFi, my home, my parents, schools and buddies WiFi flawless)
+Battery Life 12 hours
+Low Resources (Ram)
+ Brightness works
+ Trackpad works as should in native windows including right click (Trackpad +++ sucks )
+ Windows updates fine plus all newest intel drivers
+ No freezes no crashes no blue screens
+All my programs run flawless including Cloud Station (basically my own dropbox/ Google drive) Office 2013 has been flawless.. Team viewer runs great. All my CAD/CAM programs run fast and smooth.
e
Funny, I have heard quite the opposite. That Windows 8 was worse that Vista. Those are fighting words!
Performance wise, Windows 8 is great.
The problems with 8 are NOT performance related.
They're usability issues.
right click the start button
----------
The so called usability issues that I've heard from people are really non issues...what are yours?
So the USB stick with OS should go in the right USB port and the one with the bootcamp drivers in the left ? Let the mac restart and it should boot with EFI into Windows setup. That's what I did but it kept telling me I can't install Windows on either GPT partition or non NTFS formatted one, even though bootcamp prepared the partition, basically random bugs.
I have the i5.
That is very strange. I'm having no problems at all when using my Air's internal keyboard and mouse or when using the Air with my Thunderbolt Display and wireless keyboard and trackpad. Did you download the latest drivers from Apple? Try removing the Windows partition and reinstalling Windows 8 using the following method:
1. Buy Windows 8 and download the ISO direct from Microsoft after obtaining your product key (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-product-key-only). Save the ISO to your Mac desktop.
2. Connect a flash drive to your USB port.
3. Start Bootcamp Assistant on your Mac and when it asks you what you want to do, check the first two options (create windows install disk and download support media). Choose the option to save the files to the flash drive you just connected.
After the process is complete, quit Bootcamp Assistant.
4. Start Bootcamp Assistant again and ONLY check download support media this time. Choose to save the files to the same flash drive you selected in step 3.
After the process is complete, quit Bootcamp Assistant.
4) Start Bootcamp Assistant again and select install Windows. Bootcamp will automatically restart your computer into Windows Setup. (Do not hold option when the computer restarts, select EFI boot, reboot the computer youself, etc.) From there on, continue like normal.
I have the 13 inch Air. I had the 15 inch rMBP before, and even though it was rated for 7 hours, in Windows it would only last 3 to 4 hours. I'm very excited with the new Air, especially because it's lighter than the rMBP, doesn't get as hot as the rMBP and text is much easier to read in Windows 8.
Step 4. Why would you download the support media again if you had done so in step 3 ? And wouldn't choosing to save the files to the same flash drive prompt bootcamp assistant to format it, deleting the Windows setup files ?
Wait.. and you have two (4) points. Perhaps you made some mistakes ?
No I used one usb stick. I have dedicated usb sticks (windows 7, windows 8, mnt lion etc, windows server etc)
I just put the raw iso image on the stick. Checked the three boxes on the boot camp let boot camp do its magic. Took quite awhile but I have feeling it was due to my works slow internet connection.. (Max download speed 250kb)
Went to into the try clicked bootcamp assistant and made sure the second click was turned on and double click was off and I verified everything worked I deleted the osx partition
Done. Took maybe 1.5 hour and most of that was waiting
Here's my MacBook Air configuration: 8gb RAM, 4650U, 256GB ssd. 200gb for win8pro. 50 for os x.
I'm running win8pro flawlessly. During intensive gaming, it performs really really really well in the first 2 seconds, and then overheats and lowers the performance (but this is only to be expected, since gpu has a higher clock when it's not too hot and when it does get too hot, intel cores
automaticaly reduce the maximum clocks of the cpu/gpu). The Mac's frame rate is also much more stable than my $1.7k desktop (but ofc, with liquid cooling, the desktop wins on maximum graphics it can run)
wifi also works flawlessly. Connected to my home network (wireless-n) and got 2~3MB/s (what I get with my old laptop). Also connects to my SGH-T889 through tethering (both through USB and wifi hotspot) flawlessly (actually, on my phone right now, no internet around). I am not sure why you would have issues. I installed no additional drivers. I'm on the defaults. I did run windows update on first boot (maybe this has something to do with it?).
Brightness is win8's own fault. Click on the battery icon, more power options, more settings in the plan, advanced options, scroll down to display, disable adaptive brightness (yes, I had this issue initially too, seems that it was win8's fault, not the macbook air's).
I totally agree that the default trackpad's drivers suck. Completely. But I'm on trackpad++ right now, and it's lightyears better than the sony vaio pro 13 I was using before I got this.
Note that I'm not a macfag. In truth, I bought this laptop only because it was $200 cheaper than the sony vaio (wtf and here i was thinking apples were overpriced) while providing a BETTER CPU than the vaio (also returned the vaio because it didn't provide touchscreen drivers, meaning I can't install my own version of windows without losing touch and it mislead me on the battery, nominal 7.5V 4.7A, giving only 35W and double that with the sheet battery, but it makes the overall machine too fat and it's reviews said that it often dropped wifi connections).
Sharpness-wise, I can't say anything. OS X is smoother. It's always been smoother even on the same hardware. Only reason to like osx.
My Macbook Air 11" i5/128/4GB Win8Pro experience
Hi guys,
Alright, Bootcamp 5 was not straight forward - most doc don't mention EFI 2.0 until you Google to select EFI instead of WININSTALL.
I hated Windows RT (for my wife, can't find myself to recommend), returned after using it for 3 days knowing ALL the LIMITATIONS going in, giving it 100% chance - FAIL. Hardware is the most beautiful thing but what a SHAM (yes without the 'e'). I like Windows 8 Pro, as smooth as Windows can get, Metro interface grows on you, it's NOT hard and stop for once about Start button - it's okay, not the end of the world; think top-right for your essential Search, Control Panel, Device Manager. Microsoft need to hire good marketing executives and bring forth why they designed Metro and showcase it!! There are no equivalent docu-mercials like Apple does with Joni and team. C'mon Microsoft.
I worked with computers since Atari, Ti99/4A, Commodore 64, Apple IIc, 8088, 8086, 80286, 386 SX and DX, 486 25/33/66 DX, Pentium 60/66 then 90, AMD 100/120/133/166 OC, Celeron 266mhz OC to 400mhz stable. you name it, I use, abuse, hack, program, you get the picture =) I'm also a gamer spending upward of $1,000 just for one graphics card and I milk thousands of CUDA core using state of the art software and drive multi-core cpu cycles to blistering dreams.
So here are my thoughts after decades of computer use:
1. I should have used Mac earlier. Coming from a background that have NEVER used a MAC, I can Google search anything equivalent in seconds and was able to maneuver Apple OS ecosystem quickly at exponential rate. I'll eventually get in the root and write scripts after I mastered the GUI.
MAC OS is by far the MOST POLISHED OS I have ever seen. Everything from design, hardware feel, usage experience can be summed up in one word - ORGASM. There is a reason why overpriced Apple continue to fly off the shelf with IDIOTS jaw dropping in TOTAL DISBELIEF. Apple love this shyt. They know they're FAR more intelligent than geeks who THINK they know but DO NOT.
Apple knows human nature and everything they built starts with this premise - WHAT DO I WANT TO FEEL when I touch this? HOW WILL I FEEL when I use that? Will I get an ORGASM? If no ORGASM, go back the F to the drawing board to create the ORGASM experience. You see? They never loose sight of what really matters, you experience an ORGASM and hence they will be remembered in the history books in the 21st Century as the Beginning of a New Age for humanity.
2. I know I have bored you to death so I'll make it simple - OS X Mountain Lion is SMOOTHER than Windows 8, albeit not much but noticeable. That is high praise for Windows and we know running Windows on MacBook Air isn't 100% fully optimized like a normal Win-laptop hardware. Good enough.
CONCLUSION:
I love my 11" MacBook Air running Win8 dualboot on a sleek 1kg body, time to switch and completely reboot is around 8 seconds, either direction (Win8 boots surprisingly fast). This is for my wife. I will purchase the top of the line MacBook Pro 15" w/ faster Flash SSD, i7 Quad Haswell CPU w/ Iris 5100, 16 GB (to run ESXi vSphere 5.5 for Cisco UC stuff), latest beaming wifi, Thunderbolt 2 and 4K resolution. Win8 is down demoted to my secondary, use it only when necessary, unless Microsoft pull off a magic trick in time to save their consumer space, which is on a free fall. Enterprise server, cloud should be ok.
Hi guys,
Alright, Bootcamp 5 was not straight forward - most doc don't mention EFI 2.0 until you Google to select EFI instead of WININSTALL.
I hated Windows RT (for my wife, can't find myself to recommend), returned after using it for 3 days knowing ALL the LIMITATIONS going in, giving it 100% chance - FAIL. Hardware is the most beautiful thing but what a SHAM (yes without the 'e'). I like Windows 8 Pro, as smooth as Windows can get, Metro interface grows on you, it's NOT hard and stop for once about Start button - it's okay, not the end of the world; think top-right for your essential Search, Control Panel, Device Manager. Microsoft need to hire good marketing executives and bring forth why they designed Metro and showcase it!! There are no equivalent docu-mercials like Apple does with Joni and team. C'mon Microsoft.
I worked with computers since Atari, Ti99/4A, Commodore 64, Apple IIc, 8088, 8086, 80286, 386 SX and DX, 486 25/33/66 DX, Pentium 60/66 then 90, AMD 100/120/133/166 OC, Celeron 266mhz OC to 400mhz stable. you name it, I use, abuse, hack, program, you get the picture =) I'm also a gamer spending upward of $1,000 just for one graphics card and I milk thousands of CUDA core using state of the art software and drive multi-core cpu cycles to blistering dreams.
So here are my thoughts after decades of computer use:
1. I should have used Mac earlier. Coming from a background that have NEVER used a MAC, I can Google search anything equivalent in seconds and was able to maneuver Apple OS ecosystem quickly at exponential rate. I'll eventually get in the root and write scripts after I mastered the GUI.
MAC OS is by far the MOST POLISHED OS I have ever seen. Everything from design, hardware feel, usage experience can be summed up in one word - ORGASM. There is a reason why overpriced Apple continue to fly off the shelf with IDIOTS jaw dropping in TOTAL DISBELIEF. Apple love this shyt. They know they're FAR more intelligent than geeks who THINK they know but DO NOT.
Apple knows human nature and everything they built starts with this premise - WHAT DO I WANT TO FEEL when I touch this? HOW WILL I FEEL when I use that? Will I get an ORGASM? If no ORGASM, go back the F to the drawing board to create the ORGASM experience. You see? They never loose sight of what really matters, you experience an ORGASM and hence they will be remembered in the history books in the 21st Century as the Beginning of a New Age for humanity.
2. I know I have bored you to death so I'll make it simple - OS X Mountain Lion is SMOOTHER than Windows 8, albeit not much but noticeable. That is high praise for Windows and we know running Windows on MacBook Air isn't 100% fully optimized like a normal Win-laptop hardware. Good enough.
CONCLUSION:
I love my 11" MacBook Air running Win8 dualboot on a sleek 1kg body, time to switch and completely reboot is around 8 seconds, either direction (Win8 boots surprisingly fast). This is for my wife. I will purchase the top of the line MacBook Pro 15" w/ faster Flash SSD, i7 Quad Haswell CPU w/ Iris 5100, 16 GB (to run ESXi vSphere 5.5 for Cisco UC stuff), latest beaming wifi, Thunderbolt 2 and 4K resolution. Win8 is down demoted to my secondary, use it only when necessary, unless Microsoft pull off a magic trick in time to save their consumer space, which is on a free fall. Enterprise server, cloud should be ok.
You're a computer genius and you couldn't figure this out?
Then you contradict your self when you talk about how MNT Lion is smoother than Windows 8 but the Macbook isn't optimized for windows
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