Considering boot camp

[maelstromr]

Well, the discovery that Civ IV expansions don't have a snowball's chance of moving to mac native finally pushed me over the edge.

I want to set up boot camp on my early 2008 Mac Pro. I think I will install XP on a new HD (third bay.)

What do I need to do to make sure I can play games well and basically out of the box? Will the seperate HD work? Is partitioning an existing drive a better idea? What size/speed/kind of HD should I buy?

Which version of XP should I buy? Should I just get Vista instead?

I know there are answers sprinkled throughout this forum, but I thought I'd be a little lazy and see if I could get comprehensive answers here. Thanks ahead of time.

 

[maelstromr]

Ok...can someone at least address the HD question?

 

[velocityg4]

I would just get a drive dedicated to boot camp.

As for HD size if you are just going to run Civ IV I would just get whatever is the cheapest. If you are planning to load multiple games I would get a 640GB just because their is a tiny difference in price between those and 320's. Also I would go for 7200RPM.

As for Vista vs XP if you have an 8800GT or 3870 and are running newer games I would get Vista for DirectX 10. For a slower card I would get XP since it uses DX9, the additional graphics features in DX10 also drain performance making me opt to use DX9 for higher resolution but less eye candy.

If you want fast load times and do not care about the price I would get the much more expensive 10,000RPM drives.

However if you are really into gaming, have a good video card (3870 or 8800GT) and want to play new and old games at their best abilities. I would do an XP partition on the new drive for old games and Vista for DX10 compliant games. With Vista on the first partition for slightly faster load times since new games likely have more resources than the old ones.

If you want to play KOTOR then get XP.

 

[maelstromr]

That's very helpful information, thanks very much.

 

[velocityg4]

You're welcome.

PS Get Knights of the Old Republic I and II if you have not already then join us KOTOR fans in sorrow hoping for KOTOR III. If you like Civ IV try Rome Total War and the other Total War games.

 

[7on]

If you're installing onto a 2nd empty Drive then don't use Bootcamp. Just put the Windows CD in the Mac and boot holding down the C key on the keyboard. Go through the installation and be sure to choose the HDD with nothing on it (The Mac Drive will show "Unknown" and have a couple of partitions, I recommend formatting the Disk "MS-DOS (fat32)" in OSX before attempting so you know which drive is which).

Again, Bootcamp is only a Partition maker - and is only needed if you want to partition your Mac. The Windows drivers should be on your system disks/leopard disks.

 

[maelstromr]

That will save some confusion. Once this is done, how do you choose which OS you start up in? A screen at the beginning to pick one or the other?

 

[7on]

That will save some confusion. Once this is done, how do you choose which OS you start up in? A screen at the beginning to pick one or the other?

Hold down the option key when you boot up.