[shanemasters]

I am a university science/education student up in Canada and I have recently ordered a 2.0 Macbook, with 120GB HD and 1 Gig of RAM (should have it by Thursday… hopefully). I have a number of questions in regards to parallels/ boot-camp and applications but most are in regards to bootcamp/parallels (hence this forum). I am new to macs so please be gentle…

Applications/OS questions

1.This upcoming semester I will need to use a program called Matlab (for a numerical methods course) and I am wondering what the best way to run this program would be. I have the program for windows XP but am wondering if it would be better to run it under bootcamp or parallels. I intend to use OSX as much as possible and will only need to use this program every so often. I would like to use parallels but I am wondering if it is stable enough to be trusted with an assignment I will have worked on for countless hours.

2. I also like puttering around with autocad 2002. I don’t do any heavy 3D rendering so would parallels be sufficient to run this program?

3. I have a copy of Microsoft office xp. As I have previously said I would like to run OSX most of the time. I can get a copy of office 2004 from my university at a discount. I am wondering if you would suggest:

a) waiting until a universal copy of office comes out for mac
b) buying the office 2004 program for mac.
c) running office xp under parallels
d) running office xp under bootcamp

Bootcamp Questions:

Reading these forums it seems like it best to use the fat32 format (from my above comments would you suggest this is what I should do?)

Some Questions:
4. What size of partition should I make? (as you can see I use some pretty large windows software)


5. Will using beta bootcamp cause issues when leopard comes out? (I know this is tough to answer but I am wondering if creating a large partitioning could potentially cause problems in the future)

General Questions:

6. How do I get rid of the extra languages that come with OSX?

As you can see I have a large number of questions. I am really excited to be switching over to a mac, I have heard a lot of great things. If you have any pointers or good newbie resources I would love to check them out. Thanks for taking the time to read this and give your opinions!

[lookmark]

I would recommend Parallels instead of Boot Camp, if you're going be using XP on a regular basis -- it'll be worth the $40. Dual-booting gets tiresome very, very quickly. Also, this negates questions 4 & 5.

1. There's an OS X version of Matlab, you know -- it might be worth checking out to see if you can get it from your institution at the much-reduced institutional price. In any case, I believe that Parallels will run MatLab all right. You may want to wait until the final candidate of Parallels (which should be soon -- they're up to Release Candidate 1), but I hear that stability has improved greatly since the early betas.

2. Yes, Parallels should be sufficient to run AutoCad 2002.

3. Office for 2004 for the Mac will run fine. Not blazing, perhaps, but pretty good. If you can get it at educational discount, go for it, as opposed to Office XP in Parallels. As a general rule, you'll want to try to stay in one OS as much as possible -- it's just a much better experience than toggling back and forth across multiple OSes (unless you get a perverse kick out of that kind of thing).

(It's unknown when the Universal version of Office will be coming out, so I'm not sure if waiting for that is a great option. I suspect early '07.)

6. If you feel it's necessary, a free app like DeLocalizer will strip out the extra languages.