Thread: Windows on an Mac

Right, without getting into the whole Mac Vs the Dark Side debate....

I just bought a new Macbook and am dumping the Sony Vaio i'd been using. It's mainly just for off-site and holidays and I want to install Windows on it using BootCamp BETA.

It's not a Mac Book Pro (it's the black 2.16 GHZ Core 2) and I'm wondering what people's experience of this is so far and if I should wait till the official Boot Camp release.

As far as I know Boot Camp is to be rolled out as an inbuilt Leopard feature. So if you plan on upgrading in Oct you're more than likely going to be using the first official release of Boot Camp at that time.

I installed the beta on my iMac without any issues. I switched between Vista and OS X a few times at the beginning, just to take a look at Vista but I haven't used Boot Camp in nearly three months now.

Have you considered getting Parallels? It allows you to run XP/Vista on top of OS X. I setup a dual screen on my iMac and I run XP on my second monitor via Parallels. Pretty handy.

Thanks Cormac. Parallels looks good but I get the impression its not as fast for artworking such as Fireworks and stuff.
Bootcamp allows the WIndows OS to use the hardware natively where as Parralells uses virtualization.
Is that what you found?

Boot Camp certainly performs better than Parallels.

VMWare has developed fusion which seems to be an excellent tool to run windows.

Originally Posted by Cormac

Boot Camp certainly performs better than Parallels.

In what way?

Originally Posted by blacknight

In what way?

Parallels runs two OS's at the same time, Bootcamp is a single boot. Parallels is very processor intensive when you have a handful of applicaitons on the go. I have a 1GB, 2.14Gz iMac and she struggles when pushed while running Parallels.

I'm running XP under Bootcamp on my 512mb,1.83Gz Macbook right at this moment and she is twice as responsive as what the iMac would be under Parallels.

There is an application for Mac called Crossover which can run 'some' windows apps under OS X. I blogged about running uTorrent (Windows only App) on Mac OS X under Crossover recently. It's a handy alternative to running Parallels or booting into XP/Vista if you need to run a single/small Windows only application.

Just to let you know, we supply parallels (see http://www.micromail.com/MMprodDetai...productid=9397 )and we could probably source bootcamp for you if you'd prefer.

Source bootcamp?
Bootcamp is a free download..

...and thats why im not in the sales dept here! that would explain why its not on our online shop. Sorry i know nothing about macs...