Using Bootcamp (xp on dual core mac)

In My Humble Opinion
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I am putting this here to share my initial experiences with doing this and to solicit the experiences of other dopers. I realize that my other thread wasn’t specific enough! This should be a non-partisan discussion of the practical aspects of working in such an environment.

I’ll go first. So far no trouble running my normal XP suite. I use Office 2000, Firefox, Photoshop, and Lightwave primarily. Macdrive 6 is functioning. I haven’t tried any PC games.

I have installed Final Cut Studio on the Mac partition. It seems to take a lot of space, but I am sure there is a lot of junk that can be disposed of. Haven’t played with it yet. In a day or two I am pretty comfortable in the Mac environment as a first time user. It is nice, but I would need tabbed browsing to really feel comfortable hanging there. I don’t really like Safari. Soliciting suggestions.

I have read that some people have had problems installing, and I think the problems can be traced to not following the directions, and one other thing.

Be sure to not install XP over your Mac partition. That will screw ya (no kidding). XP will allow you to do this, so be careful.

Follow all the other instructions about upgrading the firmware, etc. They aren’t kidding when they say to print out the instructions. Although I didn’t, I am a computer superbrain. You should. Unless you are a computer superbrain.

The “one other thing” I mentioned is that some people have reported that they could not boot into OSX after the install. You must hold down the Option key on the Mac keyboard from before you power up until you see the dual boot screen.

I have had no luck getting the Mac keyboard and mouse to work under XP, but don’ t really care. I like mine better anyway. You will need a USB keyboard and mouse to do the install, because XP won’t recognize the Mac keyboard during setup (or any other time in my case).

If you are going to try this, I would say to order the 500Gb hard disk, so you will have plenty of room on each partition. I have a lot of external storage, so I am not hurting, but still a good idea.

If you are reasonably comfortable working with Windows and follow the instructions, even for a first time Mac user like me, you should have no trouble.

Good luck, and thanks for any comments or tips. I’ll try to post if I learn anything significant.

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Safari has tabs, as does pretty much any other browser available for OS X, except IE. Safari, Opera, Firefox, Shiira…

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Have to look for that. Thanks. It was not obvious, at least to me. :smack:

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It’s in “Preferences…” which is under the “Safari” menu. Along the top of the window is an option for Tabs. Simply enable tabbed browsing. It’s off by default.

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The only issues so far are not being able to use the Mac keyboard and mouse in XP. Macdrive seems to have the effect of making NTFS partitions visible from OSX. I did not know that was a feature!

Question: Where do I go to perform software updates in OSX? Is there some centralized thing akin to Windows Update?

Question: The UI seems to have some little traps. For example, I have clicked something, and all the NT drives disappeared from the desktop and finder, and I had to reboot to get them back. WTF? I thought all this was supposed to be easy in Mac, but the amount of bafflement has been more than I expected. Drag the wrong thing and you are screwed! The interface seems kind of breakable. :eek:

Question: It would be nice to be able to select OSX using hotkeys on my PC keyboard so I don’t have to grab the Mac keyboard every time I want to go into OSX. Surely this will be one of the first utilities written. I am looking for it.

I will report back if I find any answers to these on my own.

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Thanks. Much better now.

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Should be right under the Apple menu: Software Update.

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Hiding in plain sight. :smack:

Question: Does this update all software?

Another Question: I really miss the hard disk activity light as well as a network traffic indicator that I have in XP. The thing is so quiet that I can’t even hear the disk! Are there any utilities that would display this info on the righthand side of the menu bar with the rest of the fixed status displays (bluetooth, airport, time, speaker thingy)?

Liking OSX so far :cool:

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Many people seem to prefer Parallels to Boot Camp, even in beta format.

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I’ve been using it (Boot Camp-XP) for a couple weeks now; the iMac being my most recent computer purchase, it’s actually my most powerful PC. It would be perfect for games, except for one showstopper:

The current version of the sound card driver can’t send sound only to the headphones. Even with headphones/external speakers plugged in, the sound plays through the internal speakers, too. This makes my nearby wife unhappy if I’m playing games with irritating noises.