Today I really started.  Not that I was dragging my heels too much, but first things first - sometimes you just need to take the team for coffee - for a few hours...

Fortunately, during that time I was actually getting work done on my experiment - 5+ hours of installs.  As we all know, Expression Studio is a Microsoft product, and as such it only runs on a PC platform.  Lucky for me at Mix ’07 they gave away free copies of Vista Ultimate and after much debate and planning I’ve decided to try to create the perfect environment for my new Vista install -- namely, installing it on my MacBook Pro.

In the past I’ve used Parallels for my poly-OS pleasures in many configurations.  This time I’ve chosen to use Bootcamp to create a 60GB partition rather than have a virtual machine.  My main reason for this is that if the Expression tools are as much of a drain on resources as Adobe products, I suspect I will need all of my system available to get anything done - plus Aero (the shiny looking Vista) will only run well with a native boot - and looks matter.

So my game plan is to boot native to each OS to ensure that I don’t blame the Expression product (or Vista) for my frustrations, when in reality splitting the system resources via Parallels could be the issue.  Besides, I can still use Parallels and reference the Bootcamp instance, so I really get the best of both worlds.

For additional fun, I have added a Western Digital 320 GB Passport to the mix.  I’ve moved all of my work and media files to this USB drive after I formatted it to MS-DOS (Fat 32).  This should allow me to only have one place all my files live, regardless of which OS I have booted in - so no duping things and eating up extra drive space.

Since I plan to spend entire days working on the Vista partition (which I call Boss Hog - my Mac is Roscoe) I wanted to make sure I had everything I needed - Colbert Report, Lyrics Born, Gorillaz etc. You know how it is, I can’t be expected to fit EVERYTHING on my iPhone, so a USB powered external is definitely the way to go.  This also allowed me to safely pull about 20GB off my local Mac drive to help make room for the Bootcamp partition, so it was a win-win situation.  Out of paranoia I bought a second external to back up my Passport and Time Machine my Mac.

Bootcamp and Vista took about 3 hours to install by the time I was done.  Expression Studio 2 (which I got from a friend) took about 45 minutes and .NET framework took about an hour (or atleast felt like it).  All the other fun stuff took the rest of the day.  In addition to the things I actually needed, I installed Safari, Mobile Me (which works pretty awesome), Office, Chrome (why not), Firefox, Zune (yes, I have one - it was a present) and last but not least, a stripped down version of CS3 - just the essentials.  My 60GB partition now has 3GB of room left - let’s see who gets voted off the island as time goes on...

My last task was to customize my icons and adjust the tint of my Aero windows treatments - ok, feeling pretty good about all this.

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