am i ok to dual boot?

yes it will work

it wont slow osx at all

iGaryMonnecka said:

I really want to use boot camp to dual boot xp. i have a santa rosa macbook with 4gb ram ad 500GB 5400RPM western digital drive. from anybody's experience, do you think this will work well? also, will it slow down OS X alot?

any help appreciated,
Gary

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It will work, why wouldnt it? (go launch bootcamp assistant in the Utilities folder inside of applications)

As for slowing down OS X, it wont slow it down at all. It is completely separate from OS X. Unlike Parallels or VMware it is NOT running alongside of OS X. It is basically like having 2 separate computers... Except you can only use one at a time.

iGaryMonnecka said:

well i was really just worried about specs seeing how i kinda thought it was somewhat intensive, and i'm not usedtolaptops being very powerful lol. but thanks guys. can anyone give me a quick rundown of how you switch between XP and OSX? you restart and hold a button or something? also, you have to partition the drive down the middle? or could i, say, put 150 on the xp side and 350 on OSX side. (I know formatted capacity is less, just an example.)

Click to expand...

Sure it's really easy. To switch between them you hold "option" while the computer first starts up (during the grey screen you first see), or choose which partition you want under "startup disk" in OS X system preferences (and control panel in xp) and then reboot.

For partition sizes, you can choose whatever you want (as long as you still have enough space for your data). Open boot camp assistant and it will guide you through the process of setting up your partitions