Reliability of Boot Camp?

Hi Everyone, I love my macbook as a personal computer to do everyday things, although I consider myself a gamer turned power user, most of my general at home tasks revolve around multi tasking heavily but with everyday tasks (Nothing Enterprise Nothing Crazy).

However my current company (I work in the Pharama Sector) has decided to skimp out on the laptops they provide us and only offer i5 systems with 4gb of ram. Although some come with SSDs most of the systems are designed for people out on the field doing sales while most of the developer type roles have been outsourced I feel or are at an off-site location.

I'm on the sales team (Love the Bonus and the compensation) but I do alot of DBA, Data-work across large datasets with various types of manipulation/mining and that sort of thing. In essence I'm pretty much an IT guy but wearing a Business Hat for a whole plateau of reasons which I won't go into detail about, but know that I wanted to be here and I currently want to stay here. Some of the cons with being here are that I have to use pretty slow end user systems while trying to accomplish heavier tasks that everyday business users don't even come close to trying to accomplish.

Now to my question, I'm thinking of giving up on these ultrabook systems and bringing in my Macbook and giving up bootcamp and my system to the company to run all of my work tasks. And then when I go home I'd just switch back out to OSX to run my everyday home tasks. In a away I really like the dynamic of switching between Windows and OSX for Work and Home/Pleasure/Entertainment.

But I'm wondering if my Macbook and it's hardware can handle that type of load which would be nearly an 8 hour workday maybe 10 and then perhaps 5-4 hours back to OSX. Some of my initial concerns are that I can only run dedicated graphics on Bootcamp and the long hours could affect it combined with a shared harddrive between the two which could lead to potential problems/issues down the road. (Corruption ETC, FAT 32 and windows always has me nervous as I'd rather have NTFS at least within a enterprise setting)

I guess I'm just wondering is this idea feasible? Or maybe I should just suck it up try to get the most powerful ultra book I can get within the Latitude Family here at work and ask independently for additional ram. Just asking for a decent system within a large corporation is a lot harder then it needs to be and nobody really understands what I actually do other then my boss and he's not an IT guy

 

how much do you like fighting with drivers for your touchpad ( or 3rd party apps ) and keep in mind your battery life will drop about 38-45% on that unit as well without the graphics switching.

as for your concerns to the best of my knowledge..

no graphics switching, as I said battery life but you mentioned thermals and shortened lifespan. I will say it will shorten the lifespan but by how much is a crapshoot, when I was on those models and tried to run cpu/gpu @ 100% for 8-20 hours regularly rendering video for a huge client project I could almost kill a motherboard on demand. and I have no ideas what kind of load your apps will use, but do expect come heating as the GPU's throttling isn't that great

Wear on SSD, this one tends to worry me more, higher temps, + lots of load use on an OLD or hybrid file system however you CAN actually make an older mac run NTFS using diskpart etc. https://m.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/2fy3be/by_popular_demand_my_better_than_bootcamp_guide/

personally I would see what kind of Latitude unit they are offering and scare up RAM etc for it somehow with the IT guy. the 5000 and 7000 series units are NICE, and the RAM and 512-1T 2.5" SSD is cheap if there is a way you can talk management into the extra $250-500 for upgrades for you.

I still hold to the opinion bootcamp is for when you need it, not for a lot of usage regularly, sort of a Band-Aid to me.

 

Bootcamp reliable? My 2009 MacBook Pro 17 (in my sig) has been extremely reliable in bootcamp. In fact I used bootcamp on that laptop as my primary go to in the company I was working at for about 4yrs. I had VMware workstation guest OS inside my host bootcamp Windows OS when I would VPN to other companies servers. The reason I used vm for that purpose is I wanted to keep that env separated from my Host since the vpn servers can potentially push undesirable security measures back to me. And that did happen with some companies VPNs. I Didn't want that to constrain my host OS. Anyway, never had an issue with bootcamp Windows. Touchpad wasn't as good as when in OS X. But I used wired keyboard and mouse anyway.

So if you already have the MacBook and if you have the disk space, go for it. Or try it anyway. SSD was not an issue at least for my laptop. My bootcamp was in a partition of the SSD, but even before I had SSD the performance was okay for business.

Understand though that my Mac acted primarily as client... Client connection to database server, client to red hat Linux, etc.. As a client it was great. I did have sql server database in the vm guest, but was lightweight and just for dev purposes. Not for any real use such as accepting other clients. I disable the sql server database services when not needed so they wouldn't eat up the precious limited resources of my Core2 (in a VM guest I only had one stinkin core and no hyperthreading).

I concur with other comment though, battery is not good in bootcamp. I basically start counting the minutes and seconds the moment I unplug the AC adapter and you can almost see the battery gauge drop before your very eyes. But again, I was mostly as a desktop client with ability to go mobile between home and office and brief short times away from a power cord.

If I had a clear choice though, I would choose one of the Dells they are offering. I used my macbook because it was light and worked for my purposes, and I already owned it.

 

Depending on your requirements, you could run Windows through a virtual machine, from within OS X. VirtualBox is free but Parallells Desktop has more stable USB connectivity and a nicer layout (It's also not exactly cheap). I use Virtualbox and don't have cause to complain. It's heavier on battery and you'll want at least 4GB of total RAM to run it - but this equally applies to Bootcamp too. It won't share a disk and require partitioning since it runs, essentially, from a huge file on the Mac's native file system. You can also save 'snapshots' which alone make it worth considering.

I was not impressed with Bootcamp - the touchpad driver and thermal control in particular were things I did not like. The whole machine felt like an oven (Dust cleaned and everything repasted) and I ended up using an external mouse for the first time on any system that I've used to date.

Give a virtual machine, try and see whether it works foryou. A Windows system is the best option but it might not be possile from what you say.

 

I think for Security Reasons they prefer I not use Parallel I'm not sure. But ultimately I think I'm going to place an order with the IT Team for a new Dell Latitude 7000 series. It's like pulling teeth to get them to order me an i7 model but I think I'll ease off and just try to load up on ram and an SSD which should be sufficient enough for my day to day activities.

 

Figured I'd give an update the company decided to get me the most powerful Latitude in the lineup which ended up being an E6540. It's a monster but whatever it gets the job done, but I'd still rather be on my mac. But I suppose this monster has a dedicated card and a high end i7 for a laptop, SSD, and ddr3 ram.

Thanks.

 

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