Questions on Bootcamp

I read the Bootcamp guide already but i just had a few questions. how much does dual booting slow your computer down? i know when you dual boot you have to alot a portion of your harddrive to windows, but is that only when dual booting or all the time? i have a 500gb external and im looking at the 2.4 ghz, 250gb, 4ram black macbook. does it assign a portion of your ram too? and lastly this may be kind of stupid but when you dual boot arent you actually just booting up windows so your not dual booting but rather changing from mac os x to windows?

 

It doesn't slow down booting unless you have the odd habit of holding in the Option key every time you boot up your machine.
Dual booting is totally different from what you are describing. Each OS is totally independent and therefore won't affect the other in any way.
Perhaps you mean running it in a Virtual Machine, where you are able to switch between the different OSes on the fly? In that case your computer resources will be shared and you might notice a slowdown during intensive tasks.

 

yes; this seems to answer your other questions! when using boot camp, you boot into EITHER OS X or Windows; vmware and parallels allow for having both OS's running at the same time, which does have a performance penalty and require allocation of resources.

Budding types faster...

 

okay. yeah i guess i just read dual booting in a guide and associated it with that. thanks!

 

the term is a bit of a misnomer. dual booting doesn't mean having both OS's running at the same time.

you split your hard drive into two partitions. it doesn't affect performance at all - read more about it on wikipedia if you want.

you have windows on one partition, and osx on the other. when you turn on your computer, you can choose to boot either osx or windows by holding down the option key.

all of your computer resources are completely dedicated to whichever OS you are currently running. the hard drive change, however, is semi-permanent. whatever you set aside for each partition is not easily accessible by the other. still, you can always erase your hard drive and start completely over - so you won't do any permanent damage to your laptop or get "stuck".

look up some of this stuff here or on google to get more details.

 

are there issues in dual booting on a MBP with the brightness settings of the display? or was that just somethan i heard

 

Nope, as far as I know theres no issues with brightness.

Atleast I havn't heard of any, and I've had no problems with it.

 

No problems with brightness at all..

 

so does it automatically adjust the brightness like it would if its running OSX? or is it a manual thing?

so the only real issue would be the touch pad motions (which isnt bothersome for me.)

and the power savings, is that through a Apple utility, or does the windows xp/vista utility take over?

 

The light sensor does not work for the display in Windows, as far as I know. (I could be wrong though)

The motions for the touch pad still work. At least the basic ones do, like: two-fingers-on-pad + click = right click, and scrolling with two fingers. Tapping for click does not work and the new gestures like 3 finger swipe and pinch do no work.

Windows takes care of power saving, hence less battery time. That's just how Windows works...

 

well that would make sense if the auto brightness didnt work since it is using the windows power utility. also, can the brightness be adjusted manually? or are you just stuck with it?

and i also hear that there is issues with the backlit keyboard, that it cant be turned off? idk.

 

how much do you suggest dedicating to windows? im getting 250gb, plus i have a 500gb external hard drive where ill keep all my music, movies, and documents.

 

I actually made a little mistake above. The light sensor works, because the keyboard lights up. So the sensor must be working, it just doesn't work with the screen in the automatic way.

Of course you can adjust brightness manually by keyboard, control panel/bootcamp or by the small icon in the tray.

As far as space goes, well, if you want to have a couple of games installed in that Windows partition, I recommend installing it on the internal drive, not on the external. For speed.

Of course you can have all your music and such.

Maybe say, 100gigs for Windows, that should be enough for the OS and a couple of games...

 

alright thanks. if i were to only put about one game, and i had everything else external, minus the os, would 50gb be enough? also this is knida random but ur avatar looks really cool is that a skin for mac?

 

Well, if you plan to do Vista, then at least, say, 20gigs should be fine for the OS itself, and ~30gigs for the game, page file, whatever, screen shots, whatever you wanna do besides that. But really, Windows is pushing HDD space day by day with temp folders, hibernation files and such, so you'd wanna give it some space. Like not have half a gig left after you install everything, you know?

Yeah, those are some cool icons from Iconfactory:
http://iconfactory.com/freeware/preview/lit0

There's loads of them there, and most are free. I use CandyBar (the app) to change icons

 

I'm not sure about vista, but for me and XP I use about 20 gigs, and its more then enough.

That'd be enough for XP and atleast one or two games. (I currently have 13gigs free on it, and no games installed on c: drive)

I personally have all my games on external drives, using esata, but thats just me. If you were to just use USB it would be slow, and for most people putting the games on internal drive is what would work for them.

So 20 or 25 gigs would be more then enough for XP and a few games.