Now that Vista is supported, Vista or XP?

[rogersmj]

<rant>

My god, everyone is going around talking about bootcamp as if it was a vital piece of software... It is just a set of drivers! No more, no less. It does not do anything but give you drivers for vista/XP to support some of the more obscure apple hardware.

You'd actually get away without EVER using bootcamp if you had some computing no how. (you might lose some functionality, screen brightness control and two finger right click, but your mac will function fully and play games and what not)

1. You can resize the apple partition using a built in command line tool.

2. Most of the hardware in Mac's are commodity items with existing windows drivers.

You can find them yourself if you want to. Bootcamp just makes it EASIER to this. It doesn't make the impossible possible, it just makes it easier!

</rant>

You're wrong. Do you not remember that before Boot Camp, people spent months trying to figure out how to do it? There was a $12,000 contest or something that resulted in a workable procedure just before Boot Camp was released. Boot Camp is needed to simulate the BIOS system that Windows requires at a low level, instead of EFI.

 

[TBi]

You're wrong. Do you not remember that before Boot Camp, people spent months trying to figure out how to do it? There was a $12,000 contest or something that resulted in a workable procedure just before Boot Camp was released. Boot Camp is needed to simulate the BIOS system that Windows requires at a low level, instead of EFI.

No ... i'm not wrong... bootcamp is a package of drivers.

What enabled you to install windows was a BIOS upgrade which was released at the same time as the original bootcamp. Without that bios upgrade bootcamp is useless.

Read your history ...

 

[macjay]

Vista Home Basic vs XP

Thanks for all the responses.

I think it makes more sense for me to go with Vista. I'm curious about something: Is Vista Home Basic as resource demanding as Home Premium, or is it as "light" as XP? I read somewhere that Home Basic is the "direct replacement" for XP.

 

[volvoben]

Home Basic is still Vista, just without the media center stuff and aero graphics from Home Premium. It won't be any faster than home basic with aero turned off, it'll just cost a smidge less.

If you're doing this for 'fun', i say go for parallels. you can really feel like you're in windows, but then with the touch of a few keys be back to osx. The downside of this option is that parallels isn't free and technically you can only run vista business or ultimate in VM.

And of course buy OEM for half the price unless you're quite sure you'll be switching it to a different machine.