MacbookPro with bootcamp... is it worth buying?

XP on boot camp is running natively, at full speed. So it is ideal for development and database scenarios.

You should be able to do anything you would with a regular XP machine.

if you're gonna run an XP box anyway.... you can get much cheaper PC hardware... however if you are planning to use tiger, then go for it.

I'm currently running in Windows XP Pro on my MBP using Boot Camp and I can say that things run natively and are very fast. I use my Windows partition for playing games and that's basically it. Software development under this Windows environment should work fine since it doesn't really rely on any specific hardware. If you were doing audio work or video work you may have issues (the audio driver seems to be generic, etc, etc...). However, the included video driver does have 3d acceleration support so 3d applications should run fine (the games I play run pretty quick anyways... tested: WoW, Oblivion and HL2)

Hi Tokamak - can you be more specific on what games you've run on the MacBook and how well they run?

Thx.

At this moment, the only game I've really "strenuously" tested is World of Warcraft. This runs at a nice 30-40fps with everything turned on (except vsync), 4x antialiasing but no anisotropic filtering (I personally don't see a difference so I turn it off for whatever framerate boosts I can get). Half-Life 2 I basically turned on all options and don't notice any stuttering of graphics (I don't remember how to turn on the fps meter in HL2 so... my gauge for that is subjective). Oblivion is a bit more intensive. The resolution needs to be turned down from 1440x900 if you want to turn on any of the graphics options. Then again, it is a pretty graphics intensive game anyways. These are the games I've installed and tried out at this point in time since I'm quite... absorbed... in WoW at the moment.

I've also read reports about games like Farcry (yes, quite old now, I know) and Battlefield 2 playing very well.

I'd say the results are about what one would expect from a mobility ATi x1600 chip and the other hardware. With things running natively, the results should be about the same as a regular Windows machine of the same specs would... with exception of any possible driver boosts since the only graphics driver that seems to work properly is the one provided by Apple's Boot Camp.

But....

But, no PC that I know if fits the same amount of power into a 14.1"x9.6"x1" 5.5lb package. The Acer 8204 comes closest but its a 15.3"x11"x1.6" formfactor. The size difference between my wife's Powerbook 15" and my Acer 8104 is remarkable considering they have the same screen size. Apple allows you to have a 15" screen in the same formfactor that most PC vendors can only cram a 13 or 14" screen into.

At the same time, I have zero need for OSX. Its neat, but realistically Linux and Windows pay my bills (heck even Solaris, AIX, and HPUX and sinking to a smaller and smaller portion of the the data center).

For personal use, I need windows plus the 100% certainty that I can run the absolute latest graphics drivers for games.

Is it true that if you install XP on a Mac the Airport wireless card does not work? Does that mean you have to then use the MBP plugged in if you want to access the internet?

No, it has drivers. Which you would know if you'd done any research yourself.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ Top right.

zing

The MBP has very few things going for it: (1) very thin and light form factor; (2) DVI output (very rare in 15" notebooks -- the only other one is the Acer 8204 as far as I know), actually dual-link DVI to drive 30" monitors; (3) MacOS X and a real Unix (if you like them); (4) reasonably good video card.

Heck, for the same price, you could get both the Dell 1705 and 1505 -- the 1705 as a desktop replacement with DVI (but not dual link) and a 1505 as a light mobile laptop. However, neither currently come with anything better than an ATI X1400, which is a worse card than the Mac's card.

We have a 20inch imac running windows xp at work (compusa). It runs better than any of the gateways or hp's we sell. The new tombraider demo runs very nicely.

At my semi-local pc shop, they had a macbook runnig XP. It was purdy to play games, then reboot 20 seconds later into OSX. VERY purdy.

I think it'd be worth buying, unless you just want Windows. What I do at work is use Parallel's ( a VMWare clone for OS X) to run Windows programs, test stuff, etc. It runs extremely fast for being a virtual machine, I can watch videos on it, etc.

Then for gaming, I just boot into Windows XP w/ bootcamp, and do my thing from there, but I only need to go into Windows for games, everything else I do in OS X and the virtual machine.