Mac newbie with questions

[JohnFish]

Hi guys. I am thinking of getting a macbook, but before making up my mind I have a few questions:

I am a developer so I use Visual Studio, Eclipse, tomcat, etc on a daily basis.
I have heard about the bootcamp but I have a few questions:

1) Is bootcamp just another simulator? The question is will a clean XP install run the same (performance and feature wise) as XP through bootcamp?
2) Is it possible to install Windows XP without bootcamp? So it will boot straight to WXP.
3) Is it possible to install Vista?
4) Are there any problems with Vista on a mac that I need to know?

Thanks

 

[amakh007]

Bootcamp lets you install XP directly, but you choose which OS you want to boot it into. It is not emulator. Therefore you can run XP programs and utlize all your hardware, ex games run better. There are a few glitches mostly related to driver issues.

You can run XP or Vista. Vista is more of a memory hog, so I went with XP. It runs games (Bioshock, CoD4) pretty good.

 

[Father Jack]

I've found xP runs much quicker through BootCamp than it does on many PC's.
Like the previously poster, I too decided to give Vista a miss and installed xP ..