I am fairly new to all the Mac stuff, in fact, I don't currently have one...yet (waiting to graduate and get a job so I can get rid of this old Dell desktop). My girlfriend on the other hand will be purchasing a MBP this summer for med school. One or two of the programs she needs to run are windows only so she will be using bootcamp on occasion. She would like to get vista (please no XP is better comments, she has used vista and would like have that as her windows OS on the computer though she doesn't care which version since OS X will be used 99% of the time). I know all about getting the cheaper OEM versions online, but the thing is we can get the vista "ultimate" upgrade software for just $20 through the campus software website and its license with M$.
So I figure there are two options, buy the XP OEM online and then buy the upgrade disk(s) to upgrade it to vista or buy the vista OEM and just install that. I have searched a little bit but I don't really know the best places to find the cheapest OEM versions. I looked on newegg and if I remember right, there was maybe a $10 difference between the lowest end vista and xp + the cost of the upgrade software with both options around or just under $100. Are there any other sites that have versions of vista or xp for cheaper. The other thing I am curious about is how easy would it be to upgrade xp if she goes that route. I assume it would be just like any other upgrade since it is on it's own partition, but I'm really not sure if there will be extra issue with drivers and such. Does anyone have any experience updating windows on your Mac. I'm fairly computer savy, but if it's going to take an hour or more to tweak things to make it work then I'll tell her to just get the vista install. Finally, is there any way that I could use just the upgrade disk to do the install? My guess would be no. Thanks for any help.
So I figure there are two options, buy the XP OEM online and then buy the upgrade disk(s) to upgrade it to vista or buy the vista OEM and just install that. I have searched a little bit but I don't really know the best places to find the cheapest OEM versions. I looked on newegg and if I remember right, there was maybe a $10 difference between the lowest end vista and xp + the cost of the upgrade software with both options around or just under $100. Are there any other sites that have versions of vista or xp for cheaper. The other thing I am curious about is how easy would it be to upgrade xp if she goes that route. I assume it would be just like any other upgrade since it is on it's own partition, but I'm really not sure if there will be extra issue with drivers and such. Does anyone have any experience updating windows on your Mac. I'm fairly computer savy, but if it's going to take an hour or more to tweak things to make it work then I'll tell her to just get the vista install. Finally, is there any way that I could use just the upgrade disk to do the install? My guess would be no. Thanks for any help.