I'm off to uni soon, and as soon as Apple refreshes Leopard onto the MB/MBPs, I'll probably buy one. I'm sure you guys have dual booted Windows (XP/Vista) onto a MB/MBP. My question is this: did you run into any trouble? Was there any driver problems, like the wireless/bluetooth/something that didn't work when you installed Windows? Also, can you access stuff on the Mac partition in Windows, and vice versa? I'm asking that one because I'll probably be using an external HDD. I have a feeling that it'll either work in Windows, or Mac, but not both. Finally, has anyone tried Parallels or something similar? Does it work well? Sorry for all the questions, but I'm a complete Mac n00b
No-one own a Macbook or a Macbook pro round here? Or is this a hint I should stick with Windows or something =P
It works fine, but I wouldn't bother. I bought a MBP once I knew I could run Windows, but I never do now - it was just wasting hard drive space. OS X can access the Windows partition provided you formatted it as FAT32 (well, it can read NTFS, but not write). Windows needs some third-party software to access OS X's HSF+ partition; can't remember the name off the top of my head as I don't use it anymore but it works fine and is fairly cheap. I'd format an external drive as FAT32 unless you plan to get the software for any computer you want to access it with. Parallels works fantastically, except for gaming where it only works pretty well. But have a lot of RAM if you plan to use it.
Dual-boot with a small partition to Windows for gaming when you need to is probably the best idea. Use the Windows partition to store games and some music you listen to while gaming and use OS X for general use and such. At least, that is what I would do if I have had a macbook and what a friend of mine does with his.
I bought a macbook sight unseen based on the fact that i could just run windows if i didn't end up liking osx. I haven't yet, and I don't expect to anytime soon. So while I can't speak from experience, it seems like it is very easy to set up and use both boot camp and parallels. You can use both together, from the same partition, as well. But other than games and specialized software, there is a mac replacement for mostly everything. I'll try not to preach the wonders of osx too much, but yeah, boot camp is as easy to use as everything else on a mac. Firehed explained how the partitions work out, so i'll skip that. They have all drivers for everything. All in all, yay bootcamp.
