Newbie Needs Help With Bootcamp & Vista [Archive]

zarmanto

30th August 2007, 02:47 PM

1) Using Boot Camp is most closely analogous to installing Unix (or Linux) and Windows alongside each other on any standard Intel based computer. In other words... you reboot, select Windows, and your computer is now running a fully native copy of Windows, with all the perks (and pitfalls) that come with that. (That means: Yes, it takes full advantage of all hardware.)

2) To be quite frank, it's been my experience that Windows never runs the same on any two PCs, even if they're the same model from the same vendor. But, in as much as Windows permits... yes, it runs just as it would on any other Intel based system.

3) If by "network" you mean: do Windows drivers for the ethernet and wi-fi devices used in Apple's hardware exist? then yes. Apple provides a collection of hardware drivers which you can burn to a CD from the Boot Camp Assistant. These drivers support very nearly all of Apple's hardware under both XP and Vista.

4) Yes: You simply select the OS that you want as the default from a Control Panel. (The process is pretty much the same, whether you're in Windows or MacOS.)

5) This harkens back to my answer to your question 2... in-as-much as other vendors hardware works with "all" devices, yes. The caveat that I will add to this is that (much like some of the newer machines from Dell that I've seen) Apple computers do not have serial, parallel or PS2 ports. So if you want to work with some legacy external peripherals, you may find that you need to get the appropriate USB adapter. (Oh yeah... and they also don't have internal floppy drives.)

To bottom line it, the new IntelMacs are just as much a "standard PC" as any other computer vendor's current lineup of machines -- except that the Macs can also run the slickest Unix based OS on the market. I'd vote for the Mac every time.

zarmanto

30th August 2007, 04:36 PM

Having given you a question-by-question run down, I just thought I'd throw in some personal experiences for your perusal: I bought my iMac last year expressly with the intent of dual-booting it into Windows XP, so that I could play video games with some of my friends. (My older AMD-based PC had almost always been the slowest gaming rig in our LAN party circle.) So here is a (Ahem!) brief summary of my own experience...

The purchasing experience:
I went to the Apple Retail Store, and drooled over the Macs that they had on display. (I always love going to their store.) After looking around and deciding on the iMac, I asked if I could custom configure a machine off-the-shelf, and was pretty much told that aside from RAM upgrades, what-you-see-is-what-you-get. In other words, the retail store sells mainly stock configurations only, as Apple can't afford to have a fully qualified hardware engineer on staff at every store for that one-in-fifty user who wants to customize his system. I wasn't too particularly upset at that, as being an old MacHead, I'm pretty used to mail order... so I turned around to one of the Macs in the store, logged into the Apple Store Online, and promptly configured the 24" iMac that is described in my sig. It was pretty close to the top-of-the-line available for that particular model at that time.

The Out-of-Box experience:
It arrived in the mail a couple of days ahead of schedule! Needless to say, I was absolutely chomping at the bit to get my work done and get out of the office after my wife called to tell me this. I got home, and pulled it out... set it up right in front of my old G4 Mac, and started playing. It was absolutely a wonder to behold... this huge 24" screen sitting next to my old 17" CRT monitor from the G4. And popping up the Apple website to view some HD trailers at full 1080p resolution with absolutely no lag... (My screen has a resolution of 1920x1200.) I'd say I was satisfied with my purchase long before I'd ever installed any non-Apple software or hardware.

The Gaming experience:
In any event, it still didn't take me long to get BootCamp downloaded and installed, and to thrust my copy of Windows XP into the drive... and after a few dozen Windows Update patches, I was thrusting my gaming install disks into that drive too. I installed Unreal Tournament, Ravenshield, UT2004, Dawn of War, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Counterstrike, Counterstrike Source... and probably some others that I don't remember off the top of my head. I checked each game briefly as I went, and I had some difficulties with some of the oldest games in my collection; in particular: the original Unreal Tournament, and Ravenshield. It took me several days and a fair amount of research time before I stumbled upon the OnMac wiki, where the answer (http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Users/Guides/Disabling_Dual-Core_on_a_per_application_basis) to my dilemma laid waiting for me. (I quickly became a very grateful and very active member here in the forum, as you may have guessed by my post count.) Once I got that little bug ironed out, I was just as thrilled with my iMacs gaming abilities as I'd been with those HD trailers... very nearly everything was as smooth as ice -- and once again at native resolution.

Needless to say, newer games like the recent release of Bioshock can force me to go below native resolution to achieve comfortable gameplay... but I'm still more then satisfied, and here's one more reason why: After I got all of my games running comfortably, I ran the PCPitStop.com benchmark against it, and asked one of my LAN party friends (who had one of the fastest machines in our group, and almost always acted as server when we played) what his computer had scored on their benchmarks... he grudgingly acknowledged that my computer bested his rather handily, even though he never did tell me his actual score. But by far better then that was when I took my iMac out of the box at another friends LAN party... where several people there were about as antagonistic towards Macintosh computers as you could possibly imagine. At the beginning of the evening, they were verbally trashing my iMac, snipes like this one to our host, "Man, you know there's actually a Macintosh in your house?" were constant and merciless... until they saw how Dawn of War looked on that screen, of course. As the evening waned, the negative comments soon vanished, and I'm quite certain there was a slight air of envy.

Multi-boot Madness:
In the course of time, I also installed Vista... but I wasn't satisfied to simply give up XP altogether. The details are available in other threads on the forum so I won't go over them again here; I started experimenting with triple-booting (http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=2620), and learned some lessons along the way... and other people in this forum have experimented with refining the process to various ends, even to the point of quad-booting (http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=2793). I've pretty much determined that Vista simply isn't for me; while it performs quite well on the hardware, it just adds far too much unnecessary complexity and overhead to the system. What's more, all of my games continue to run perfectly in XP, and the one game I have which is DirectX 10 enabled (the BioShock demo) also runs quite acceptably using DirectX 9... so Vista remains on the harddrive, but largely dormant for now.

Add-ons:
Of course, I have to add one important disclaimer... I really only ever boot into Windows to play games and experiment with Vista. For anything else, I use the iMac as it was intended... running MacOS X. So along the way, I've also bought an EyeTV Hybrid (http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyetvhybrid), which brings in over-the-air HD television broadcasts. My wife and I set up the computer in our bedroom as our television/video recorder using that -- and got rid of both of our old standard definition televisions. (We still kept an old VCR... but we don't really use it much.) Watching HDTV on this iMac is absolutely the best way to watch TV. We also have an iPod for my wife, a Bluetooth cell phone for me, a digital camera, and a digital camcorder... all of which play very nicely with the iMac.

The Bottom Line:
Well, I pretty much already said this at the tail end of the previous post... but suffice it to say, I very highly favor the Macintosh over other PCs.