Boot Camp experiences

[chscag]

Thought I would share some experiences we had with Boot Camp and installing WinXP Home on a new MacBook 2.4 Ghz, 2 Gb, 160 Gb HDD, Leopard 10.5.2.

(We purchased a generic OEM full install copy of XP Home from a web supplier rather than employ one of the known work arounds to install an upgrade copy.)

First attempt to install XP after creating the partition for it with Boot Camp failed. Turns out the install program did not like our external Apple keyboard and external monitor being hooked up during the process. After removing them the install went OK. We chose to format the XP partition as FAT-32 so we could read\write from it while in OS X. (we used a partition size of 8 Gb)

Installing the drivers for XP from the Leopard disk was straight forward and all went well except for the graphics driver. The driver would not support the recommended resolution for our external monitor (Samsung SyncMaster 220WM). We resolved that by going to the Intel web site and downloading new WinXP drivers for the GMA X3100 embedded graphics chipset.

After installing the new drivers from Intel, all is well. As a matter of fact the Intel drivers and control panel for WinXP are actually easier to use and setup than the OS X one provided in "display preferences" in Leopard.

Only drawback is having to reboot the MacBook to get into XP. Later on we're going to give Virtual Box a try. Been hearing good things about it.

Hope the above helps someone who is going to or contemplating using Boot Camp to install XP or (Vista).

Regards.

[Thyamine]

VMWare Fusion (and I think Parallels) will let you use your BootCamp image as a virtual machine so you don't have to reboot to use it.

[fleurya]

I highly recommend Fusion for a virtual machine. It's the only one that will let you use both cores of your processor if you need the processing power while running Windows that way. But overall, Fusion and Parallels are the same with the same features, so either one is good.

If they could just get these virtual machines to run my games, I'd never have to reboot!