[Carpediem]

Hi Gang,

Its been 20 years since I used a mac. Remember the cute little beige box that would say "Hello" to you when you booted up? I'm a lawyer and for years its just not been feasible using a mac with so much PC specific software but that all changed with the intel chip.

So over the weekend I bought a shiny new 17 inch macbook pro and I love it. It is actually irrational how happy I am to be working on a mac again. I've gotten all my software to work except for a few pc specific programs that refuses to cooperate with Crossover Mac. So it looks like I'm going to need to go boot camp or parrallels. I have been surfing and please excuse me if these questions seem obvious but I have a few...

1. Boot Camp from external drive?
The guy at the Apple store thought I could when I bought it but I've seen a few entries that say its not possible. I was thinking of getting a small firewire portable drive and running it from there. That would be ideal. Anybody know if its possible? Assuming it isnt ....

2. Any idea how much space XP takes?
I plan on running the xp home operating system, aVast antivirus and two small legal programs. THAT IS IT. No surfing in crappy explorer. No games. Nada. After being forced into windows for 20 years I plan on spending as little time as possible in that system. If I have to partition my precious macbook pro 160 gb drive I want to make it as small as reasonably possible.

3. Does Parralels slow OS X down?
If I run Parralels, does that drain system resources? The ability to hot swap between them would be nice but I don't think I'll need those windows programs everyday and if simply using boot camp as opposed to running parralels makes my OS X run smoother, sign me up. If its not an issue, however, it would be nice to do it on the fly (besides it would make all my windows loving lawyer friends crazy to see me do it.. grin)

Thanks for your patience and all replies are much appreciated.

David

[Gossamer]

1. Can't help you much here. I'm pretty sure the intel Macs are capable of booting from an external USB drive, but I don't know if it's supported with Windows.

2. XP will easily take less than 10 gigs, maybe even as low as 5 if you're not doing much.

3. Parallels will slow OS X down when it's running because it takes away physical RAM. Two gigs is great though, since XP can run fine on 256, making the difference not very noticable at all.

[wpd7]

Windows need to boot off the internal hard drive. No ifs, ands, or buts on this one. You could however, partition your bootcamp to use all of the internal HDD for your windows and carry your mac partition on an external HDD.

Standard install of XP SP2 with the latest updates and no other programs will take about 4.2GB. If you don't need XP except to run a few legal apps, i recommend that you look into slimming down your XP install. You could get it down to as low as 400MB.

With the max amount of ram and dedicating at least 1GB to parallels, you shouldn't see a noticeable lag anywhere. However, I find that if you use the full screen option in parallels, the lag is practically nonexistent, even with less ram dedicated to the parallels VM.

[Carpediem]

Thanks for the info. I'm leaning toward just using boot camp because it seems more idiot proof and while I am sort of geeky .. if things get jinky with my new mac my head will explode.

Maybe I'll do the partition at 12gb. I'm tempted to make it 8 or 10 but 12 gives me enough of a wiggle factor to know there shouldn't be a problem. I DON'T want to do this twice. I honestly don't see me logging the xp more than a few times a month. Most of my "take home" work can be easily done in the much more pleasant OS X.

[Gossamer]

I wouldn't recommend running your main OS from an external drive...you'll get beachballed a lot.
And if you want idiot-proof, definitely go with Parallels. No disk partition, no Windows installer trying to screw up your computer, none of that. It's a simple disk image that can't fark your whole computer like installing windows for real can.
If anything will make your Mac 'jinky,' it's putting Windows on it with BootCamp. Virtualization is pretty much idiot-proof, and Parallels is very easy to use.