Does Windows 7 work without issues on the October 2010 MacBook Air notebooks?

Question

Known concerns I have with using a MacBook Air as a Windows 7 machine are:

Severe:

• Blue Screen of Death caused by appletmp.sys, which may require a full re-install of Windows 7.

Tolerable:

• External USB optical drive requirement
• Limited "Genius Bar" support

Potential concerns are:

• SSD "Trim command" support or lack thereof
• Ability of Windows 7 to use external 27" Cinema Display

These are more problematic.

Are there others?

Primary use will be photo-editing (Photoshop Elements), QuickBooks for Windows, Outlook, and presentations. The virtues of MacBook Air over other devices are battery life, SSD, build quality, screen quality, and ultra-portability.

edit:

I have installed Windows 7, but I have not yet discovered whether TRIM is surfaced in the BIOS.

Answer 1

I'd worry a bit about storage space on the low end model. Windows 7 + OS X + some software + patches over time will fill up that 64GB low end model real quick.

Windows 7 supports the Trim command. OS X does not. Fortunately for OS X, it appears to do almost (but not quite) as well anyway, for reasons unknown. So the thing to remember here is that the bios must also expose the trim command to operating system, and it's possible that Apple didn't feel the need to do that.

I also wouldn't worry about the display. Display drivers are a pretty much solved problem in Windows. But again- by the time you install photoshop, quickbooks, and office, you may find yourself dangerously low on disk space.