Windows XP Gamer Edition...

[mbrellisford]

There is a (custom) version of Windows Xp out there called "Windows XP Gamer Edition" which is basically just a bare minimum stripped down version of Windows XP Professional. It doesn't install anything that isn't needed and I think I read somewhere that it only has 13 processes running in the background.

Any reason why this wouldn't work with boot camp and parallels? Drivers and everything should be fine right since, at heart, it is still just Windows XP, right?

 

[CylonGlitch]

It is nothing more then a hacked version of XP with most of the stuff you don't need if you're playing games turned off. It is not an official copy of windows; although some companies are trying to sell it as such -- they get a license, hack it, and then resell it. There are a billion torrents when I was googling it that showed up; but still, not something I would do. You can do this yourself by just learning how to optimize your machine yourself.

 

[Bill Gates]

I second CylonGlitch's take. I would install an official copy and disable unneeded services and perform other tweaks myself. If you want to tweak Windows further then use a tool such as nLite and do it yourself.

 

[trose]

There is a (custom) version of Windows Xp out there called "Windows XP Gamer Edition" which is basically just a bare minimum stripped down version of Windows XP Professional. It doesn't install anything that isn't needed and I think I read somewhere that it only has 13 processes running in the background.

Any reason why this wouldn't work with boot camp and parallels? Drivers and everything should be fine right since, at heart, it is still just Windows XP, right?

I'm using it and it works fine. I want to spend as little time in Windows as possible and don't want to bother tweaking it.

The only trouble I had was updating to the newest ATI drivers... not the BootCamp versions. Though, this in itself is a hack, so the problems I had most likely are not related to the XP install at all. And in the end, I resolved my problem, so it's all good

It is *very* slimmed down, though, so I wouldn't use it unless all you plan on doing in XP is gaming.