Jump to content

Any of you bought a Macbook and ended up running Windows


snoxu
 Share

15 posts in this topic

Recommended Posts

Hello everyone. I'll be in the market for a new notebook some time next month or so. I'm a long time pc user and I've narrow down the choices to taking the leap over to Macland with a 13" Macbook or get another standard pc notebook, probably an Asus...

 

I'm currently running OSx86 on a Toshiba notebook to get a feel for it, and I like all the eye candy, simplicity of use, a few other cool features, but other than that and after only a few days of tinkering around, I don't see what much else OSX has got going for it. I'm finding myself looking for the same apps I use in Windows or decent equivalents.

 

So say in a scenario where I buy a Macbook and later get tired or bored of OSX, I basically see 2 options, put it up for sale or run Windows on it, my only concern is if there are a lot of issues and kinks to be worked out.

 

Basically what I want to know is will running Windows on a Mac almost exclusively be a good idea or does it have it's share of unresolved kinks (drivers, power and battery management, cpu throttling, etc) that would make it not a good idea.

 

Thanks in advance for your input

Edited by snoxu
Link to comment
Share on other sites

My experiance has kinda been back and forth, It seems that windows defender doesn't want to update for some reason, but this may be due to the fact I "Borrowed" XP off the internet. :P Other than that there seems to be a problem with the core 2 duo version macbook, my friend had a C2D and his machine would freeze every few seconds and than keep going freeze, go, freeze, go. It seems to be a problem on apples side, I narrowed it down to the sound drivers that seems to be the problem, but have not found a work around. But on my regular core duo macbook it runs flawlessly. A recommended piece of software is MacDrive ( http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/ ), This too I "Borrowed from the internet. So all in all, a nice combo of both worlds.

 

 

NOTE: freeze and go doesn't happen in parallels.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

XP on a MacBook is every bit as good as running it on any other PC laptop. With the latest bootcamp, you get proper two-finger right click, so that classic reason of 'no right mouse button' is pretty much null and void.

 

you have the ultimate safety net. if you REALLY cant stand Mac OS X, you can just use WinXP.

 

i dont think you'll get tired of OS X once you start using a real intel mac however. just do me one favour, okay? get enough ram! i'm talking 2Gb here...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

XP on a MacBook is every bit as good as running it on any other PC laptop. With the latest bootcamp, you get proper two-finger right click, so that classic reason of 'no right mouse button' is pretty much null and void.

 

you have the ultimate safety net. if you REALLY cant stand Mac OS X, you can just use WinXP.

 

i dont think you'll get tired of OS X once you start using a real intel mac however. just do me one favour, okay? get enough ram! i'm talking 2Gb here...

 

You are so right Munky, and since Macbook's HDDs are slow as hell, buying lots of ram is NEEDED.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are so right Munky, and since Macbook's HDDs are slow as hell, buying lots of ram is NEEDED.

 

You do realize that the macbook HDDs are the same 5400 RPM drives in 90% of other notebooks right? 7200 RPM drives are still an insane premium and rare.

 

As for running windows on a macbook pro. I've been running Vista Ultimate on mine with 1GB RAM just fine for months exclusively. Only time I go into OSX is when I need to update firmware or just feel like playing with OSX. It takes a little getting use to some of the control quirks of the keyboard layout and single button but once you do that everything is great.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

XP on a MacBook is every bit as good as running it on any other PC laptop. With the latest bootcamp, you get proper two-finger right click, so that classic reason of 'no right mouse button' is pretty much null and void.

 

you have the ultimate safety net. if you REALLY cant stand Mac OS X, you can just use WinXP.

 

i dont think you'll get tired of OS X once you start using a real intel mac however. just do me one favour, okay? get enough ram! i'm talking 2Gb here...

 

 

so true. on my mini i only have 512MB of RAM and its not as great as my PC with 1GB of RAM dual channel and 2 SATA HDs

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I would appreciate some more detail on power management in XP.

 

Is it as efficient? Any cpu throttling, shutting down one of the cores, hibernation, etc? Any convenient way to switch between different power management profiles? Any third party power management apps that work with the Macbook?

 

How is battery life overall on XP?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i got the macbook wit 1.8ghz wit 1gb of ram and i basically run windows xp pro which isn't a standard ver, rather one that's been edited to install and not install certain stuff, by default it installs firefox and a few other stuff. it runs really smooth, runs pc games moderately, i mean it's not gonna be spectcular since it's a intergrated gpu. battery wise, i get about 30min to 1hr shorter then i usually do, i think my battery life is like 3hrs and some min running OSX, it depends on what i'm doing. you can do some power managing, but i haven't tried it yet since i'm plugged in to the wall...

 

but power wise, it uses prolly more then the OSX

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I bought my Macbook Pro solely because it offered me the opportunity to run all operating systems on one computer.

 

Now, I am stuck with Vista as the only OS after needing to ditch my Sabayon installation because of some multimedia issues.

 

Hopefully in the next few days, a new build of Leopard will come out and I can dump Vista and reconfigure my tripple-boot again, this time with ZFS working from the begining, a clean Gentoo installation, and Vista just because I need it for work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just bought a C2D Macbook today and Im running Windows on it and doesn't seem to be as glitch free as I was expecting.

 

My biggest issue is in Windows XP the trackpad freezes up the system constantly. I'm starting to think running Windows XP exclusively is not a smart idea.

Edited by snoxu
Link to comment
Share on other sites

My biggest issue is in Windows XP the trackpad freezes up the system constantly. I'm starting to think running Windows XP exclusively is not a smart idea.

 

 

Really? Freezing? When I had my Macbook Pro (2.0Ghz CD/1GB ram), I had to run XP exclusively due to a problem when it came to getting Tiger CDs. After I spent a couple days fiddling with it, I had it running much better on my MBP then it did on my desktop, and after Apple released the newest (1.1.2, I think?), everything worked flawlessly out of the box (save sleep- sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't). After that, I ventured into Vista-land and ran that without problems for a while, getting everything save two-finger scrolling to work as near perfect as anything Microsoft can work. Due to another slight...problem...involving a ruined LCD, i've 'upgraded' to a C2D Blackbook (2.0Ghz C2D, 2GB ram), which is also running Vista Ultimate without a hitch. Perhaps you should try a re-install of XP, because really, you shouldn't be having constant freezing problems unless A) You got a bad install of XP, B) You've got a bad install of Mac Drivers or a bad burn of the CD or C) You've got some bad piece of hardware in your computer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I bought a Macbook Pro last week, wit primary intentions of running XP on it mostly...but I wanted a solid, no mess version of OSX running....hence the macbook. I've been running a Hacentosh since 10.4.4, and was ready for something I didn't need to root around in to get it to work smooth every new kernel release.

 

Needless to say, OSX OWNS on this thing. XP is more the 'novelty' on here. Oh, it runs fine, and as fast as it should, at it's base, OSX isn't running any faster than XP with the multimedia apps I've been running on both OSes...BUT, it still just works way better.

 

My only complaints are the lack of pageup/down keys and a Home key on the macbook. That and I still find it's far easier to look at a large windows directory than a large Mac directory...that will adjust eventually I'm sure.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...