Running Windows XP on Intel Mac

[mikeyb54]

I've been using Apple computers since the mid-80's for Photoshop, as well as Final Cut Pro, for my home-based business. Like most folks with a corporate day job, I use a Windows-based PC as well. Now, I'm ready to upgrade my Powerbook G4 to an Intel Mac Book Pro laptop in an effort to have both Tiger and XP OS accessibility on one computer.

While I'm not concerned on how well the Mac Book Pro will handle XP and the Microsoft Office suite with Word, Excel, etc, I'm wondering if anyone has used any RAM hungry, heavy processing programs used for photography/video editing with XP on the MacBook Pro, and how are the results? The company I work for uses a proprietary Windows-based program for sales presentations and video conferencing.

Thanks in advance for any feedback. My home business will continue to use Photoshop on the Mac side.

[Paul Shields]

I'm interested in this question myself, but I can't answer it until about a week from now when my two footer iMac arrives . However, regarding running Windows apps I presume you 've thought of using Parallels? That should work fine for non-intensive apps.

As for photography software - obviously Photoshop is not in a Universal Binary format yet so will be quite sluggish in OSX (though possibly quicker than running native on your Powerbook G4). It should be very quick if you boot into Windows XP though. The latest Macbook Pros have Core 2 Duo CPUs which are very quick indeed. I would think a couple of gig of RAM would make life much easier running apps in either OS.

Anyway, I'll let you know my own findings on this in a week or so .

[mikeyb54]

Thanks PaulS. I just had my lunch break and went to the local Mac retailer store. They had several Intel Macs on display but only one with XP loaded. Unfortunately, no apps to run.

I've seen various online retailer sites advertise the Parallels program, and it's definitely on the list.

Well, we'll be on the look out for your report in a week or so.

thanks.

[timjon]

I've got an Intel Macbook with 2GB RAM, dual booting (using Boot Camp, not Parallels) between OS X and XP. The XP partition has Photoshop CS on it.

It's very quick - much faster than the desktop PC I was using when I bought it (a Pentium 2.4, 1GB RAM). Opening a folder of RAW images in Adobe bridge was roughly twice the speed, despite the slower hard disk. In fact, I ended up having to upgrade my desktop PC as after using the Macbook it was painfully slow in comparison!

When booted into XP, the fact that the hardware is made by Apple is fairly irrelevant - it's just a very fast PC laptop, and I'd imagine the same would apply to the desktops.

Cheers,

Tim.

[riha]

as timjon says, if you run it using bootcamp, it runs like if t were an PC, nothing that makes it slower than any other pc. But if you run parallells, then you share the resources between the systems, even if you don´t emulate windows (it is pc hardware) you will get less memory and cpu to work with.

[mikeyb54]

Thanks Tim and Rickard. Your input is very valuable feedback. I now believe that I'll be able to have just one laptop vs two, and meet the needs of both my business and corporate day job.

thanks again.

Mike

[Paul Shields]

Well, after now using the 24" imac for a few days I can safely say:

* Performance is blistering for pretty much all apps in Universal Binary (UB) mode
* Aperture (trying out the trial) is mostly annoying, and very annoying in that it can't deal with my large collection of DNG files (do you think Adobe and Apple are having a spat at the moment? I think so...)
* Lightroom is running much better than my previous experience. Still don't like it's segmented architecture, but it does look promising - and of course DNG files are handled very nicely
* Latest news - Silkypix (my favourite RAW editor by far) released version 3.0 just a couple of days ago in UB format! I now have that as my main RAW editor. I'm not sure I need a fabulously complex media management system a la Aperture (or Lightroom for that matter). Managing my files manually within the file system and having a great RAW editor like Silkypix when needed is perfect for me right now.

* Photoshop CS (which is still only available in PowerPC format) actually runs very well indeed under the Rosetta PowerPC emulator - seems at least as quick as it was running natively when I had a PowerPC G5 mac. Makes you realise how great the next release will perform when UB (so long as it doesn't get bloated).

* Windows XP - I set up a partition using boot camp and that went very smoothly. Drivers work for all of the imac HW (including bluetooth, isight, wifi etc). I actually used my Windows MCE CD which is supposed to not be supported, but it installed fine. Performance is basically like a very quick Wintel box - which co-incidentally is what it is .

* Parallels - so far very impressed with how this performs. Also love the eye candy of it when it rotates the screen as a cube when switching OS's. It seems very well done. Note though that VMWare are soon to release Fusion for the Mac that will probably challenge Parallels - but competition is great, so bring it on.

If you don't need dedicated hardware for your Windows apps (and I don't - just need MS Office for Outlook - which works fine under emulation) then I personally wouldn't bother with boot camp. Much easier just to flick windows between the operating systems using Parallels (or Fusion when it arrives).

All in all - I love this machine. Apart from the office app mentioned above I have no need for Windows, and OSX combined with the glorious 24" iMac is almost perfect for what I enjoy doing most - photo and video editing. Apple did the right thing by shifting to Intel. Looking forward to next release of OSX Leopard early next year .

[Mr. Pickles]

How much did all this 24" IMac system and stuff cost you?

[Paul Shields]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pickles

How much did all this 24" IMac system and stuff cost you?

I got the iMac direct from Apple (minus a small corporate discount) so you can work out the prices for yourself .

[Mr. Pickles]

Thanks for the help.

[Paul Shields]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pickles

Thanks for the help.

Hey - an obvious question requires an obvious answer .

[mikeyb54]

As the OP, I wanted everyone to know that I went ahead and purchased the new MacBook Pro 15", printed the Boot Camp installation guide (which is highly recommended), downloaded and installed Boot Camp, followed by Windows XP on a partition solely for XP. During the install, follow the instructions and like me, there should be no problems, as PaulS already outlined above.

Windows is running smoothly, and we're definitely happy campers.