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When he first booted the brand-new machine, he was greeted with this horror, which should be familiar to anyone who has purchased a new Windows machine:

The VAIO came loaded with so much shovelware that it took in the ballpark of fifteen minutes just to boot the first time. After the desktop came up, the disk just kept grinding and grinding and grinding, as Norton (60 day trial!) popped up, followed by Trend Micro Anti-Spyware (60 day trial!), a dialog box warning me that my Bluetooth module was not set discoverable (uh, thanks?), a cascade of Sony windows (for which they designed their own window style), the Ask! Toolbar conveniently pre-installed itself into Internet Explorer, some bubbles asking me to set up such-and-such piece of hardware, and, I’m not kidding, an “All Programs” menu in the Start Menu that spanned three columns.

The real pain began when he tried to wipe the drive and do a clean reinstall of Windows. The story is not for the faint of heart. The real kicker comes at the end:

XP on my Mac though? Smooth sailing. *smacks lips* Is that the delicious taste of irony? I think it is!

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I have corresponded with them briefly by email, and have read their reasons for not supporting Boot Camp. Unfortunately, even with Boot Camp support, I’d still be screwed. I use a PowerBook, so Boot Camp is out of the question. So unless the school drops exam software altogether or picks another vendor (highly unlikely, given that these arrangements are set up as multi-year contracts), Boot Camp support does me no good.

By now you’re thinking, “What kind of Mac evangelist are you?” I am, in fact, not as dedicated as Michael Katz, who runs a Mac user group at his school. Michael put together a document for the school administration, outlining how various other law schools handle exams. His document, like the Exam Software page on MLS, reveals that while some schools don’t support Macs during exams, many do. The Katz Document goes into more detail about how and why each of the schools in his survey (which is a subset of the Exam Software list) answer the “do you support Macs” question.

For those of you who may already be trying to convince a reticent administration of the need to support Mac use during exams, you’re in luck. Michael has agreed to let me distributed The Katz Document to those who inquire. If you want a copy, just let me know.

Leopard won’t arrive until October, but in the mean time, here are some of the newly-revealed features that look most appealing to me:

• A completely rewritten Finder. Many Mac users have been clamoring for a faster, better Finder for some time. This looks like it could deliver. The powered-up Spotlight search capabilities will be welcome, too.
• The iTunes-ification of OS X. Quick Look lets you look at files in the Finder, without opening them, the way you currently can look at album covers in iTunes. I could see this being particularly useful in situations where you’ve saved several versions of an OmniGraffle diagram, for example.
• Integrated Boot Camp. This was a no-brainer, but it will be nice to have. Some people will be disappointed that Apple hasn’t announced built-in virtualization, but as Jobs pointed out in the keynote, Parallels and vmware already are doing a great job with virtualization.

The biggest and most intriguing surprise for me is where Apple is taking Safari. When Apple’s Open Source-based browser was first released, it was seen as a way of making up for Microsoft’s withdrawal from the Mac browser market. But now Safari is available for Windows, and seems to have become a fundamental part of an integrated Web/widgets/iPhone capability.

In the new version of Safari:

Now you can turn any website into a Dashboard widget. Click the Web Clip² button next to the address field in Safari and select exactly what you want your new widget to display. Safari sends your web clip to Dashboard, where you can view it alongside your other widgets.

Widgets are also a preferred means for third-party development of iPhone applications, which means that these easy-to-create Dashboard widgets should also run on the iPhone with little or no modification. If the iPhone’s Internet capabilities are as good as advertised, this would mean that the iPhone will very rapidly have access to a huge range of widgets.

Clever indeed. Now if I only had an AT&T mobile account and a few hundred extra bucks… .

He installed Vista on a Lenovo laptop, a 20″ iMac, and a MacBook Pro. Oddly enough, the MacBook Pro proved to be the machine that took to Vista with the fewest problems. If you are interested in using Vista on a Mac (or on a PC for that matter), it is worth reading about some of the difficulties he encountered.

Jeffrey notes that XP is probably still the preferred solution for Windows compatibility on a Mac:

If you want to run Windows on a Mac, you can run Vista, but you will likely be better off with XP, both in terms of avoiding the potential installation/activation issues and in terms of the fact that Vista requires more RAM and appears to run more slowly than XP.