My MBP is bi-OS now
I’ve been spending the last week getting my MacBookPro nice and clean (reformat) for installing Windows XP on. First I had to back up all the data (junk) I have. I was looking at the 500GB external hard disks for sale, and it seems that now you could get one of those for less than $200. But since I was able to cram all my junk between my three hard disks (2 x 160GB, and 100GB) so that was good.
After that was done I reformatted my hard disk. That was the easy part. The next step was a little tricky. I had to decide whether to go wotih Bootcamp or Parallels. The former needed a reboot of every time I want to switch OS’s, whereas the other didn’t need any reboot. However, one needed an outlay of $79 (Parallels). I decided not to be cheap and got a copy of Parallels. Now I’m thankful I did it because the latest version (ver. 3.0) is so smooth in transitioning between OS X and Windows XP.
Why do I need XP? Well, some apps I needed at work needed Windows. Plus, I’m thinking that in the future I might get PC games, and then I can play it on my Mac.
So, my MBP is bi-OS now, and happy.
July 29th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Boot Camp and Parallels don’t need to be an either/or thing. Parallels 2.5 or later can use your Boot Camp partition to boot from. Granted, it’s not as fast to launch as a dedicated Parallels VM, as it has to completely start up XP from scratch and shut it down every time (no suspending), but it’s convenient (one copy of XP has all my goodies), and space efficient (only one copy of XP on my MBP’s internal drive).
I end up using Parallels about 75% of the time, and only boot to XP via Boot Camp for gaming.
July 30th, 2007 at 10:26 am
True. But I want to have minimal Windows on my MBP, so I’ll just stick with Parallels, unless I really need to install bootcamp.