bootcamp question(sort of)

well i just found out that bootcamp comes pre installed but you have to buy windows(not sure why I thought itd come with it). Anyway, I'm a college student, what's the best place to buy win xp from? Also, how big of a partition do you guys recommend I make? My hdd will be about 200gb and I just plan to use xp for games. Does OSX take up a lot of space?

Checkout www.newegg.com for a cheap copy of XP. I made my partition about 30-35GB in order to install and run the games that I wanted too.

The cheapest form of XP to buy is an OEM version from newegg. Cheaper than full retail version. The main difference is that the OEM version is a "system-builders" version and the license only allows you to use it on one machine - even if that machine craps out or you buy a new one. Full retail version allows you to move it around. Your call (but I bought the OEM version for my Mac). You won't need a really large partition and the main thing is whether you want OSX to be able to both read and write from your BC partition. If so, you'll have to format it in FAT32 rather than NTFS (you'll get the option during the BC/XP install process), and that has a max size of 32GB. With NTFS, OSX can only read. May not matter for games but thought I'd mention it as it is relevant to partition sizing.

Cheers