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I have a standard installation of Windows XP Pro (SP2) in VMware Fusion.

I gave it a 20 GB virtual hard drive. After adding my software development environment from work and a few other applications (about 2 GB total) it has grown to 10.7 GB on my Mac hard drive (7.1 GB used inside Windows - most of the rest is likely to be "peak" usage which was previously allocated and is now wasted space inside the sparse disk image which will be reused if Windows needs more disk space).

This suggests XP itself needs at least 5 GB, probably somewhat more to be on the safe side. Add the size of whatever applications and data you need...

Ok cool...might go for somewhere between 20 and 30.

Phil

The good thing is that the virtual machine only takes up as much space as it needs rather than the maximum you allocate it.

Not when it is a BootCamp partition. Much prefer to do it that way with Windows, to have the option of booting or using VMWare with the partition.

Phil

Odd about the price. Maybe it's a Magnum Mac thing because Parallels was definitely cheaper than Fusion, maybe old pricing.

I have 2GB RAM in my 1.6Ghz Intel Mac Mini and have absolutely no problems with speed of Parallels. As for upgrade issues I'm still trying to work that out because I have had no problems at all aside from sometimes not being able to communicate with the server in the early days but that seems to have been fixed.

I have had huge issues though with early releases of Fusion with corrupting images forcing a complete rebuild so I guess it's kind of 6 of 1 half a dozen of the other.

I would still say stick with VMWare though because it will make it easier to share images with other people on different platforms.

We've got Parallels with Vista running on a Macbook and an iMac,both bought at Christmas. iMac is 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Macbook 2.2GHZ Intel core 2 duo. Both have 3Gb of memory and neither have any problems with running Vista. If Vista is deemed sluggish then it is not apparent on either machine. Likewise, not experiencing any problems with Parallels either.

I'd guess it all comes down to what you want to do with Vista and or Parallels.

OK, for the record, I went with a 32 Gb partition, as that is what the Boot Camp assistant suggested...but that was as far as I got. When I managed to boot into the Windows installer, my keyboard was unresponsive, so I can't do the install.

This chap had the same issue..... http://www.askdavetaylor.com/install_windows_xp_in_boot_camp_on_macbook_pro.html

To me it sounds like not only must you have SP2, but a fairly newish version of the whole Windows install? My idea of using a PC keyboard seems to not be a solution, as this chap implies.

iroiro, can I take you up on that offer and borrow your install CD if you're around on campus?

Cheers, Phil

Sure, I can drop it off tomorrow sometime (just let me know where and when).

Hopefully it'll work fine - haven't had a prob with it in 2.4Ghz MBP, and have done more than a few XP installs


Iroiro.

Phil,

BootCamp absolutely MUST have XP SP2, in fact it does state it on the Tech Specs page of Mac OS X:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs/

The original beta version allowed XP to install then you could upgrade to SP2 but the latest betas and the official BootCamp require SP2 right from the word go. There must be something in SP2 that BootCamp needs.

I had a weird issue where something similar happened but it turned out to be my Aluminium keyboard that was at fault. Switching to my old Apple Keyboard worked.

Yep..it needs keyboard drivers I would say. I'm certain I have an SP2 install, but I'll try the alternate keyboard trick (didn't have time last night) but iroiro is also going to loan me a CD. I'll keep you posted.

Phil