More on the Macbook Pro & bootcamp thing...

eplamondon wrote on 6/30/2006, 1:28 PM

Hi there,
I've read the posts where some of you have been running windows on a mac.
Seems like most of you have chosen bootcamp.

Now that this has been out a while - I wanted to boil my questions/observations down to these:

1. Boot camp or Parallels: I hear parallels allows you to switch over without shutdown. I also hear it takes away use of firewire ports and external usb on the windows side. Is this true? If so, that basically answers my question as to which one to use. So I'm assuming boot camp is the best way to go unless someone says otherwise

2. The windows partition. How big have you guys been making this???
I have the 17" macbook pro with 120gig. 40 of it has the final cut studio suite on it. What would be sufficient to load Vegas, my windows version of photoshop and a handful of other things, and not feel squeezed for space. I have not plans to load media on the physical drives.

3. FAT32 or NTSF ?
Since I don't plan to load media on the physical drive, I'm not worried about the 4g limit in this case. I'm reading that the mac side can read ntsf but not write to it. But Fat32 it can read & write. My conclusion is that this may be the best way to format the windows partition. Is there any reason I should not ?

4. External Hard Drives: Can I plug in my existing external hard drives that I've used for my PC? Or do I need to reformat it for mac? Up til now, I have swapped jump drives and some portable USB2.0 drives with no problem between the two - but I've not gotten as far as capturing/editing media on the mac yet. (just got it).

5. Finally - should I wait before deciding to do the bootcamp thing? I read about the future release of Leopard where bootcamp would potentially be accessible without a restart. Might this affect things for me down the road if I load bootcamp now - or would that scenario offer me a simple way to just upgrade the newer bootcamp (if indeed that does happen).

Anything else folks should be aware of before pulling the trigger on this? Any gotha's that you've encountered since running the two OS's on one machine? So far, y'all seem like happy campers.

I just want to take an informed approach to this -

Thanks in advance for your thoughts. Fel free to add any points you think I may have missed.

ED

Comments

Cheno wrote on 6/30/2006, 3:38 PM

I've heard that Parallels isn't too stable yet. That's from two vendors running machines with both Bootcamp and Parallels. I'm running bootcamp so can't officially say for myself. If there is an issue with firewire / usb I'd be surprised because that truly hoses all your periphials for the most part. Can't imagine that's the case.

I've got a 80 gig system. Partitioned 10 gig for the NTFS side. Probably more than I'll need but just wanted to be safe.

I probably should have done FAT32 because of the read / write issue from the mac side. I can still access my mac drive fine when I'm in XP though and that's all I need at this point since I'm not running anything else PC but Vegas.

External drives - FAT32 - again because of the same problems with mac / ntfs

Hard to say what Leopard will do differently aside from just having bootcamp run as part of the OS - I would say that a good hotkey switch will be down the road but so far, i'm happy with a fast dual boot.

I'm only running the 2.0 proc - be interested in your render test times on the dual core, hdv test on the VASST site.

cheno

Coursedesign wrote on 6/30/2006, 4:01 PM

The released version of Parallels is good (out just a few days ago).

10GB is good IMHO, although you could do less with Parallel's Compressor extra cost option.

Reboots with Bootcamp are very fast, especially XP seems to come up faster than on PCs for some reason.

USB and Firewire are also fine, even for use with audio gear like the Presonus Firebox.

stutch wrote on 7/2/2006, 6:06 PM

30 GB for windows

I cannot tell you exactly why, but the gang over at TekServe here in NYC strongly encouraged no more than 30GB for the Windows partition.

They do a lot of these installs and I suspect there is a good reason for the 30GB limit.
They are also a total Apple store so they know how to work under the hood.

Hope this helps

farss wrote on 7/2/2006, 6:25 PM

OK,
so now the BIG question, running OSX on a non Apple box. I believe there's been some success in this but as it's not a legit thing to do it seems to be a bit under the radar.

Bob.

GlennChan wrote on 7/2/2006, 11:38 PM

I cannot tell you exactly why, but the gang over at TekServe here in NYC strongly encouraged no more than 30GB for the Windows partition.
It might be because Windows can't make a FAT32 partition >30GB. I forget the exact figure, but it simply can't make partitions above that size.

However, other utilities can. Not that you actually want to do this... it's so much more convenient just to use the winXP disc to create the FAT32 partition. If you want to access files on the Mac partition, Macdrive might be the way to go (runs on the PC side, lets you see Mac partitions).

bigcreek wrote on 7/3/2006, 7:23 PM

So, has anyone run Vegas from within Parallels? What your experience?

Cliff Etzel wrote on 7/5/2006, 11:00 AM

I actually found an iso of OSX 10.4.6 with the necessary hacks just to see what would happen on my generic desktop machine. Older P4 2.4 with 845WN mobo, 1.5gb PC133 SDRAM, nVidia GF3 ti200 128mb vid card. Installed on a spare 40gb drive I had laying around.

notes: install is smooth, need to utilize the disk utility to wipe and format the drive. Install takes about 20 minutes or so. After the initial registration BS, I am left at 1024x768x32@60hz refresh on a 20 inch CRT monitor.

Installed iLife'06 to check out iMovieHD and Garageband. Not too impressed to be honest, but did like the similarities between GB and AP.

Performance is sluggish - I am sure due to the hardware I installed on. No luck at all on my laptop - video card gives 4 bit color!

TBH - I can get snappier performance on my PC and the interface is similar by installing Aquadock 1.0. I had to try this out just to see what all the Mac zealots rant and rave about. The file structure takes some getting use to. Nice feature is that you cannot install anything unless you give your Root password (administrator) - nice security feature in that regards. Other than that - I prefer XP with VV6, AP4 and SF7 - my machine seems so much faster - even though I HAVE to use windows.