Ok, first off, hey everyone! I'm new to this forum!

Now to my question.. I play an online game called Maple Story, and I'm about to buy a Macbook pro, and I got the chills because of this:

I was researching some stuff on this game, and seeing if it could be played on a Mac, and they gave two obvious solutions, use Parallels or Boot Camp. I would use Boot Camp. But I got to reading, and the place I got this info from also said that because of the tight security that the Mac puts on the Windows partition, then the Windows partition will crash if too many programs are downloaded or if it gets any viruses at all.

This worried me.. because it wouldn't TRULY be a native partition if it just crashed because it had a few programs on it.. then it would be like a program (Boot Camp) trying to run another program (the Windows partition) trying to run programs (whatever was downloaded on to the Windows partition).

But then I read some more; this was an old post. It was posted back when ONLY OS X 10.4 Tiger was out, and it said you could "download" boot camp off the Apple website, making NO reference to the fact that it came on the Leopard DVD. This means the "Boot Camp" they are using is the beta, I assume. Would that be why it crashed? Because it said Parallels would crash to? I don't know much about Parallels, maybe this is a common problem with it, or again, maybe it's because the post was so old and Parallels had a lot of bugs back then too, but I'm pretty sure the Windows partition of Boot Camp wouldn't crash simply because of HAVING a few "too many" programs.. any suggestions?

Thanks!!

Relax. Remember, just because its on the internet doesn't make it true

Boot Camp, to put it simply, sets up your macbook pro to run Windows just like a regular PC. It isn't a program or emulation that will "crash" if you get too many problems with it. Its just a tool to get XP up and running, that's all. Once installed, you now have the option to dual boot your system for either Mac or Windows. It will run just like a normal PC with full hardware support. You will always have the option of removing your Windows partition whenever you'd like (after you backup your data of course).

As far as viruses and such, its no different than a regular PC. Being smart will help keep your system clean. Keep in mind that Mac and Windows are two separate operating systems. Meaning what happens on one system won't affect the other. If you get a virus while running XP, it will only affect that copy of XP and not your Mac. Since you'd only be using it to play games and not your main OS, most likely you don't have to worry about security software. Just be sure to update your system and everything will be fine.

Parallels has the advantage of making backup "copies" of your XP installation, so if you do get a virus infection, just throw away that XP in the trash and load up a new copy. Parallels won't give you full hardware support, but for regular applications (minus games), its great for running Windows programs because you won't have to reboot.