Running primarily XP on a MacBook?

Is anyone doing this? I know it sounds strange, at first...but I'm in an odd situation. I've been a dabbler with Linux here and there the past few years, but never really got that far into it...just seemed like it was too much effort for all the alleged benefits I was going to derive from it. Besides, I do need Windows a good chunk of the time--I trade online (software requires XP), and I play a lot of poker online (nearly all of the big online sites are Windows only).

I hate my Toshiba Satellite, which I've only had for a year now. It's slow, and it runs so hot, that if often just shuts down without warning (and not even when being overly taxed--just run a couple of poker clients, Firefox with a few tabs open, and a POP email notification client app I have, and I've seen my whole laptop just shut off without notice. Leaving me having to scramble to a desktop to get back into my poker games (and hoping I haven't lost money during the connection interruption).

Additionally, I figure I would have a CLEAN XP--not a laptop with a bundle of crapware and adware that some manufacturer has been paid to stick on my desktop.

The picture gets really good for me if Parallels starts to perform as advertised: I could run OS X natively, with my online poker running in a window on the OS X desktop.

So I'd be kind of weird: Probably a fairly large XP partition, and a much smaller OS X partition. Does anybody use their new MacBook/MacBook Pro this way? If so, what partitioning structures are used? Yes, I know about the 32 gig limit for FAT partitions. I think it highly likely I would go well beyond that, and have an NTFS partition that would probably be 50% (or perhaps even somewhat more than that) for Windows. For me, this whole prospective endeavor would be partially an excuse to get a nicer Windows laptop, and secondarily a way to explore the Mac world at the same time. It would get even better with a reliable Parallels app, of course.

And how do I solve the need for a right-click and CTRL-ALT-DEL within Windows on a Mac, anyway.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

There is a free utility that can remap your keys:

You can simply remap the keys to the way they are on a windows laptop (make backspace or line feed act as delete for example)

I'm hoping to do the same thing, using a non-pro Macbook.

The only thing I was wondering about is battery life. Would the way in which windows was optimised for battery performance be the same on a macbook?

Also, I question I was hoping sombody could answer: Would a FAT32 partition be readable by both OSX and Windows? Is this possible

thanks

deas said:

Would a FAT32 partition be readable by both OSX and Windows?

Click to expand...

Yes, it could.

Yeah, my research indicates that FAT32 is readable by both, and NTFS is as well, but the Mac can't write to NTFS. This is basically the same deal that exists for those who dual boot Windows and Linux. Which makes sense since OS X is based on one of the BSD versions, which is a close cousin to Linux.....

I'm still chewing on this idea myself. It's either this, or I'm going to get a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 and do the dual boot thing there (with some flavor of Linux). There's some plusses and minuses for me either way, so I'm still trying to make up my mind.