Question regarding leaving applications open on Bootcamp

[yonyyaxel-1]

Hello Everyone!

So here is my situation: Macbook 12' 2015 1.2 coreM 8gb ram 512 sdd with a bootcamped partition running windows 10.

A few months ago, I was playing a video game (star wars battlefront 2 2005) on the windows partition and then my laptop died. I then just rebooted into osx and have not touched my bootcamp partition since.

Today, I booted into the windows partition and when I did, the game started up right where it left off in the the middle of a mission.

I have restarted the osx side numerous times (this is my daily laptop) and it has power cycled maybe 50 times (100% battery to dead). I was wondering how it was able to keep the game going and keep the windows on, while the computer was off.

If my assumption is correct, having that partition on all the time, wouldn't that drain resources (CPU, RAM) from my mac side?

But, I was under the assumption that they could not both run simultaneously. Did it freeze my session and store it in the ram for all these months?

If anything doesn't make sense, or you need more details, let me know. I just want to understand this a little bit better.

 

[valdikor]

I am sure others will give you more erudite answers, but I can assure you that your resources (CPU, RAM) on the Mac side were not being drained. “Boot Camp” is nothing more than an additional operating system installed on your computer and Windows is thus not in any way connected to macOS. Your Windows probably got into some sort of hibernation state and saved its state within its hard drive partition, I don’t know how this works in Windows these days, but I can imagine it got pretty sophisticated since I last used Windows.

 

[CWallace]

But, I was under the assumption that they could not both run simultaneously. Did it freeze my session and store it in the ram for all these months?

To my knowledge Windows does not currently support application resumption like macOS does. So what happened is you have Hibernation enabled so your Windows session was written from RAM to the Boot Camp partition on the SSD when you switched to macOS and read back into RAM and resumed when you booted back into Windows.

Boot Camp / Windows cannot run independently in conjunction with macOS - only one or the other can be active and using active system resources at one time.*

* - One can run their Boot Camp partition as a Virtual Machine under macOS using Parallels or VMWare.