While lugging a regular laptop around PDC, I was wishing I had a smaller, lighter model to take in to a conference, use on a plane or train, or whatever. Something I could slip into my existing laptop bag without adding crippling weight, and that would be capable of running Vista with reasonable perf, on a decent-sized screen.

Eventually, I decided to get a MacBook Air (but with the standard HD, rather than the 64GB SSD), then partition it half-and-half for MacOS X and Vista. I'm only leaving MacOS on there because I don't have any other Macs to play with - so you could just repave the entire thing if you wanted.

One thing about the Air is that Apple doesn't support 64bit Vista on it. But while it doesn't support it, that doesn't mean that it doesn't work! There are a couple of things you have to do to make it work, though.

First - follow the standard BootCamp instructions to get Vista installed from the 64bit media.

However, when it comes to installing the drivers and so forth, insert the MacOS Disk 1. You can't run setup.exe because it checks the hardware and refuses to run. So, start a Command Prompt as Administrator. CD your way to the Boot Camp->Drivers->Apple folder and run BootCamp64.msi instead.

That will install almost all of the necessary drivers - apart from the video card. But don't worry, you can download that from here.

Again, this isn't supported, and Your Mileage May Vary, but all seems well - all of the magic Mac keys are supported, the multitouch pad etc.