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Ask HN: Macbook Pro and Windows XP?
2 points by avner on July 5, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
To any existing MB Pro owners: I'm about to buy the MB pro and was wondering if there are any caveats I should be aware of regarding performance and component compatibility when dual booting Win XP and/or Ubuntu on the machine.

Do the trackpad along with things like the mic/camera perform as they are supposed to or is some stuff locked in to OS X?

I tried looking this stuff up but the blogspam is just ridiculous.

Any clarifications are welcome. Thanks.



The only thing missing in windows that effects me is you can't use the track pad to do things like two fingers to scroll and two fingers and click for right click. So you basically need a external mouse for windows to be useable. I haven't updated my boot camp drivers in awhile though and never use the windows any more so that might have changed since the release of the official boot camp with leopard


My only problem with Windows is that my fans go nuts when I'm using it rather than scaling properly like they're supposed to in OS X. However, my Macbook Pro is a version from back in 2007.

I can two-finger scroll and two-finger right click just fine in Windows... but I don't boot Windows often. Maybe it's in the bootcamp settings?


I have had success with my clients using BootCamp, Parallels, and a VMware flavor I can't currently remember the name of. Apple does a fairly decent job of creating a "drivers CD" for Windows to use the MB's hardware.


prob'ly VMware fusion 2.05 (I don't have my mac with me). Works pretty well as long as you start with 4G physical RAM on the host. Putting Ubuntu desktop or XP in a VM with 1G RAM is pretty slugg-o. The only thing is that right-click with the Apple hockey pucks is hit or miss (mine are a couple years old, I think, maybe they're betternow)




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