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mac 7 or xp

omar4578

omar4578

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 3, 2011
133
0
SoCal
now this might have been answered before but i did a search and found nothing, sorry if its a repost but i gotta know...

i will be getting my mac on friday and first thing i will do is to add windows to it..i have a few questions regarding this though...

1. will it slow down the computer if i have 2 op systems?

2. which is more better with the specs of my laptop? win 7 or xp
(specs include: 8gigs or ram 2011 mbp 2.0ghz 500gb hd...)

and finally...

3. should i get virtual machine or boot camp?
(i already have a computer running win 7 at home so all i would need it for are possibly some apps that cannot run on mac and just because of the fact that its nice to have windows on the mac?)

thanks for your input ;)
 
1 - Windows on your Mac will not slow it down if loaded into Boot Camp. If you load Windows into a virtual machine and run it simultaneously with OS X it will slow your Mac down some which is wholly dependent on how much RAM you have and how much is allocated to each OS.

2 - Go with Windows 7 on the laptop. However, 7 and XP should run just fine.

3 - It all depends on what you want. Boot Camp requires a restart into Windows and you cannot use OS X. A virtual machine allows you to use both at the same time. It's your choice.
 
omar4578 said:
1. will it slow down the computer if i have 2 op systems?
Click to expand...
Nope - provided you're using bootcamp over vmware. Only one will be active at any one time. Just be sure you size the boot camp partition appropriately not making one partition too small. With VMware you're adding overhead so things will be a bit slower in both the host and guest OS.

2. which is more better with the specs of my laptop? win 7 or xp
(specs include: 8gigs or ram 2011 mbp 2.0ghz 500gb hd...)
Click to expand...
At this point, I'd pretty much avoid XP, windows 7 brings too much to the table. You'll be much better off using that over XP

3. should i get virtual machine or boot camp?
(i already have a computer running win 7 at home so all i would need it for are possibly some apps that cannot run on mac and just because of the fact that its nice to have windows on the mac?)
Click to expand...
Personal preference question.
Advantage of VMware is that you don't have to get out of OSX, you can run windows inside of OSX. The main disadvantage to this approach is the windows environment does not have direct access to the hardware which would result in a performance hit.

The main advantage to bootcamp is performance and direct access to the hardware. Most people run bootcamp do so for games or other apps that are intensive or they have little need for OSX. If you're not running games and want to be in OSX most of the time, then bootcamp may not be the best choice, conversely if you think you'll be using windows mostly, then yeah its probably a good idea then
 
If you're getting a 2011 Macbook Pro and are planning on using Bootcamp and not VMWare/Parallels then you need to go windows 7. Apple dropped support for XP in Bootcamp with this version and doesn't provide drivers.
 
Definitely go Windows 7 over XP. Personally, I would go Vista over XP anyday too.

XP is really old now and doesn't even support things like the newest versions of IE (which is probably not an issue for most people but still...).

Also, Win 7 has a really nice UI and is generally much slicker/easier to use. Search in Win7 is also much much much better than XP.
 
Since there are no drivers provided for XP for this revision MBP, you're pretty much stuck with win7.

With that said, I'd go bootcamp so that the windows partition has acess to all of the computer's power.

Virtualization works well so long as what you're doing doesn't require much computing power.
 
Great info guys. So, for casual use, boot camp sounds like a better route. Having all the resources at your finger tips is a good thing.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
cool thanks for your advice guys!

ill definitely go with bootcamp windows 7 now. :D

one more question though!!

will windows 7 read all of my hardware? like will it run like a pc with 8gigs of ram and stuff?
 
omar4578 said:
cool thanks for your advice guys!

ill definitely go with bootcamp windows 7 now. :D

one more question though!!

will windows 7 read all of my hardware? like will it run like a pc with 8gigs of ram and stuff?
Click to expand...

If you install a 64-bit OS you will be able to take advantage of all 8GB of ram just fine, a 32-bit install can only utilise 4gb(it's actually a bit less than that but we'll not go into the fine details)

Yes, it'll run just like a PC with the same specs. No difference. The components in an MBP aren't any different than the ones in a comparable PC, hardware is hardware.
 
maflynn said:
conversely if you think you'll be using windows mostly, then yeah its probably a good idea then
Click to expand...

I believe if hes using windows so much that he never really uses OSX it might be a better idea for him to invest in M17x!
 
WilliamBos said:
Can you run W7 64 with less RAM?? 2GB-4GB??



Sent from my iPod Touch using Tapatalk, as if anybody actually gave a ***** if it was a desktop, laptop, crackberry, I-phone or freakin' morse code or for that matter smoke signals... :)
Click to expand...

Yes, though there really isn't much of a point to it. The only true advantage of 64-bit is to be able to access more ram.
 
WilliamBos said:
So you would not notice a difference with 32 bit??
Click to expand...

In general usage, no. Not really. When you get into computationally intensive processes that use lots of really big numbers then 64-bit will be quite a bit faster than 32-bit. But a lot of that is specialized usage right now (like photoshop's new content aware fill features and some filters and such, as an example) or with video encoding and such.

For most individuals, there's going to be little if any advantage in speed 64 bit vs 32 at the current time.
 
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