Best setup for gaming & advanced excel

Hi. I just got my first mac (a macbook white) and I'm loving it. Nonetheless there are two powerful reasons why I'll have to install windows on it. The first one is that I'm a gamer and I play some 3D games from time to time. The other is that I'm an advanced excel user (including macros) which demands the use of Excel for windows.

Now, I previously inquired about the subject on this forum regarding the use of excel and windows and fellow forum members recommended VM Ware fusion; I tried it out on a friend's mac (before switching) and it worked great so I decided to go for the mac. Nonetheless, I've read that running 3D games with Fusion is not such a great idea, as the windows VM can't write directly to the video card. Therefore, in this case, boot camp should be a better solution.

However, I'd really like to run OS X when using excel so I wanted to know if a viable alternative would be to use both; that is install boot camp and run the boot camp partition when playing games but accessing this partition through Fusion when using excel. I don't know if anyone has any experience with this setup and if they recommend it as a viable solution or if I should try something else.

Any advise will be greatly appreciated.

As always thanks in advance.

As a footnote my Mac is a 2.1Ghz core 2 duo with the intel graphics card and 4GB of RAM.

Absolutely. That works fine, it's how I did my setup initially. First do the boot camp install, then install VMWare - it will recognize the boot camp install and offer to create a virtual machine from it. Not being a gamer, I eventually unloaded the boot camp install and now work solely in Fusion. Remember that for the boot camp install, make sure you've got a standalone, retail or OEM System Builder's version of your favorite Windows flavor (XP SP2/3 or Vista), and print out the boot camp instructions beforehand and follow them exactly.

In contrast, the Fusion install and VM creation is a snap.

Good luck!

Great! I'll do just that then. One final question though. Is it possible to resize the partitions in Boot camp after both OSs have been installed? Just in case that I find that I need more/less space in one partition or the other.

EDIT: One more question. If my Win partition is over 32GB I will need to format it as NTFS. Will it still work ok with Fusion?

Might also be worth looking into Parallels which is a little better on the 3D side of things.

Parallels can also access the Boot Camp partition.

CampTune can resize the partitions. On your second point, Fusion will access the larger NTFS partition for a VM.

As far as Parallels vs. Fusion go, both have free trial versions - once you install Windows on Boot Camp, you can download both and see which one works for you better. VirtualBox is also free and will create a VM from your BC partition.

Cheers