odered a 1330 but reconsidering, but have boot camp questions

So I've been waiting forever for my new Dell m1330. Not due till 8/22. So it occured to me that I could get a MBP and dual boot(boot camp) xp or vista. Anyone have any experience with this. I am a gamer but am not expecting all eye candy. I am also into audio recording and have an interface that works with both pc and mac. I also need to be able to do CAD since I am an engineer.

So does it really run windows natively now, meaning it's as it was solely a windows pc?

Should I wait for Leopard and when is it coming out?

What is the battery life?

 

Okay, I'll answer two of your questions:

Boot Camp really runs Windows natively. If you run Windows you won't be running OS X, if you run OS X, Windows won't be running. When one OS is running, no system resources are being used by the inactive one. To go into the other OS you restart the computer.

Leopard is arriving in October. It really depends, of course if you wait until then you'll get your MacBook Pro pre-installed with Leopard, but Leopard isn't that expensive anyways ($129, cheaper than Microsoft Office Student) and there's no indication of any MacBook Pro updates around October.

I can't comment on the battery life, as I don't have a MacBook Pro. Sorry!

 

on my macbook my battery life is significantly shorter running windows xp compared to os x.

 

Do u run the xp in bootcamp or vmware/parallels?

 

Just to clarify, educational pricing on OS X 10.5 should be around $69. $129 is the full price.

-Zadillo

 

I'm not sure if he's a student...he never really stated...but other than that you're right. $129 is full price, $69 for student price.

 

The power management in XP/Vista right now sucks, the battery life is about half to two-thirds what it is in OS X.

Other than that, it runs perfectly. If I didn't tell you it was an Apple, you wouldn't know the difference.

Don't forget that Apple might also be announcing a 12 or 13" MacBook Pro sometime this fall.

 

Oh, duh. When you mentioned the price of Mac Office for Students it made me think he said something above about being a student. Now that I look at it, he didn't say anything like that.

My mistake...

 

I am kind of wondering if the final version of Boot Camp included in 10.5 will have some updated drivers/etc. to deal with power management, etc. better.

-Zadillo

 

No problem , I just used Microsoft Office Student to make a point about a full version of OS X being cheaper than a student discounted version of an office suite .

 

well i am a student. Has anybody done gaming on xp with the mac. And since the Mac comes with the new Nvidia 8600GT, I'm assuming it can do dx10 fine.

 

I see the MB's for sale are still using Intel GMA 950. Anyone know if X3100 integrated will be on a MB soon?

 

I wouldn't expect a MacBook update until October. The last update was May, so an update around August would be too soon.

And to the original poster, DirectX10 isn't available on XP (possibly "yet"). But the GeForce 8600GT card is great for gaming.

 

i meant if i put vista on there, will i be able to game with dx10.

Also, how does it dual boot if windows uses a different file system than macs?

 

Seems likely the next time the MacBooks are updated, but that might not be for a few months.

Honestly, if I was in the market for a MacBook right now, I wouldn't really let the difference between GMA950 and GMAX3100 make a difference; especially in OS X I doubt it would make much difference at all.

-Zadillo

 

Yes, you'd be able to game with DX10.

With Boot Camp, you create a completely different partition that is formatted (either with FAT32 or NTFS, whatever you want), which Windows uses.

-Zadillo