Couple of questions on boot camp

Why run windows on a Mac? I thought the whole appeal of going with a mac was the superiority of the OS? My wife will be using my new macbook pro from time to time and she wants windows 7 on it. Will this affect the performance of my MBP? Will I need a fortress of anti-virus like I do on my PC if I run windows 7?

Obviously I'm not doing a good job selling the better half on the merits of a Mac

Well, the appeal of running Windows varies obviously from person to person. My father is a CPA and runs some software for work that is strictly a Windows only application. Regardless of your (or your wife's, if she's the one using Windows) reasons, your computer will not see any slowed performance. Bootcamp does not run both OSs at the same time, only one by itself. Either Windows or OSX (selected at startup, if you hold option as the computer boots). If you were to run a virtual machine using Parallels or VMWare, then you'd see performance loss.

Anti-Virus? Yes, you should probably go about installing an Anti-Virus on your Windows partition. As far as an Anti-Virus on your Mac partition, I don't think it's necessary. There are no real and true "viruses" for the Mac, as far as I'm aware. Nothing self-replicating and propagating. Hope this helps, and that someone else can share their opinions as well!

Zep

Depends on what she wants to do with W7. I run WinXP under VMWare as a virtual machine with no antivirus software. Before I used it, I saved the image of the clean, virginal virtual machine. If it ever gets infected, I'll kill the infected copy and restore the virginal one. I'll lose data, but I move my data to an external drive anyway, so I can always get it back.

That approach works for me because I have the hardware behind a hardware firewall and I don't get email or do internet surfing on the virtual machine, so the chance of infection is very small. If I were more exposed or doing those things, I'd probably have to use AV or be ready to whack the virtual machine more frequently. I noted that XP is about 30% faster on my iMac as a virtual machine because I don't have the AV crapola. The beauty of virtual is that I always have my OSX there, with XP in a window, just like everything else.

On a more basic level, what is she doing that would require W7? If it's just preference, why not let her learn to love OSX? It only took my wife about a week to abandon Windows completely!