how much would boot camp slow my macbook down?

I'm thinking about putting windows on my macbook as well as leopard, especially if i get an external hard drive, but how much would it slow my computer down?
I have one of the new macbooks. The main reason for doing this is for school stuff and ruckus.

o8strider8o,

I'm in Windows with parallels right now, as I'm using Firefox to answer you. I don't notice any difference in speed for the Mac. The only difference I notice is a little lag when I drag something - it seems to "skitter" a little. Otherwise I'm tickled pink when I can have both OSes working together on the same desktop. Neat!

My Macbook is 3 months old, so I guess you could say it's a new one... I did change form 1GB RAM to 4GB and upgraded the HDD from 120GB to 320GB.

You'll love it, go for it.

Noel

o8strider8o said:

I'm thinking about putting windows on my macbook as well as leopard, especially if i get an external hard drive, but how much would it slow my computer down?
I have one of the new macbooks. The main reason for doing this is for school stuff and ruckus.

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Boot Camp puts Windows on a partition of your hard drive entirely separate from OS X. It will have no effect on your use of OS X except for possibly a longer start-up time since there will be two bootable partitions instead of one. The only exception to this might be if you leave only a tiny amount of space on your boot drive to work with.

is it better to use boot camp or parrallels?

Depends on what you want to do. If you are going to play games, especially demanding ones, for sure Bootcamp as you are booted directly in Windows and performance will be just like Windows on a similar PC of similar specs.

If it's just for say opening a Word or Excel Doc and other normal stuff, Parallels is very nice as you are in OSX and can run OSX Apps and Windows Apps side by side. For anything that requires real 3D though I would use Bootcamp.

oh so for parallels i dont need xp or vista on my mac?

o8strider8o said:

oh so for parallels i dont need xp or vista on my mac?

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No, you still need XP or Vista. It just allows it to run inside OSX instead of having to boot into XP or Vista. With Bootcamp you boot directly into Windows. NO OSX. It's like running a Windows machine.

Parallels is a program that is used to immulate a operating system, whether its xp or some various version of linux. You pretty much install the os into parallels and it runs like an application of OSX. If you use bootcamp as mentioned above, you could also parallel that bootcamped partition. I believe its easier to comprehend once you see it in action for yourself. For more info, do a search on parallels or bootcamp. Their has been literally thousands of threads posted on this very topic.

MDCjr said:

Parallels is a program that is used to immulate a operating system, whether its xp or some various version of linux.

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Assuming you mean emulate this is incorrect.

Parallels actually runs a real operating system at close to native speeds, what it emulates is the hardware interfaces.

Amen-Moses

o8strider8o said:

oh so for parallels i dont need xp or vista on my mac?

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Of course, at that point you might as well just hit up Wine/Darwine. Aside from the basic Windows software that Wine has been able to run for ages, Parallels just uses Direct3D technology taken directly from Wine to let you play games from five years ago, slaps a pretty logo on it, calls it a "revolutionary new feature," and charges you $90 for that open source technology if I'm not mistaken. Apparently, Office 2003 runs quite nicely through Darwine in Leopard.