Is it worth installing Windows XP?
Archives Forums/MacOS X Discussion/Is it worth installing Windows XP?
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| I have an Intel iMac Dual Core 2 machine and have partitioned it into 3 - one for OSX, one for Windows and one for Linux. I need to install Windows before installing Linux but I just wanted to know if you think it is worth installing XP or Vista. How long do you think XP is going to be a viable platform for developing BlitzMax apps? Even if Vista is the new cutting edge and XP might be unsupported in a few years, would it still be worth running XP rather than Vista? My hardware apparently can support Vista's requirements but it seems to be getting a bad rap overall. What do you advise? |
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| Could you not have four partitions, and install them both? |
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| Personally, if you don't plan to use them much, whichever you choose I would install in a virtual machine (Parallels or VMWare Fusion) instead of dedicating a partition to them. That way, it's much easier to get rid of if you decide to drop it altogether, or if you change your mind about which one you want, you can reinstall without worrying about Windows stepping all over your other OSes. |
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| I had thought about emulation but I don't like the idea of it not running totally natively. I don't really care about having to reboot to switch os's. I don't really have room for two windows partitions, either. That's why my question is whether to go with XP or Vista. Presumably almost everything written for XP is compatible in Vista for the most part? |
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| Microsoft will support Windows XP until the year 2014, I'd say that's quite some grace period. ;-) Anyway, I'd go for Vista. As Apple did in Leopard, Microsoft made fundamental changes in the underlying architecture, and Vista is going to be the technical foundation of future Windows versions and all other software for that platform. From the long term perspectice, it just does not matter that Vista is slower than XP - it is the new standard, and you will want your software to be compatible with it. Just make sure that you have at least 2GB RAM in your iMac, and your Core 2 Duo processor will handle it just fine. I have it running nicely on an even older 2GHz Core Duo CPU, but with 2 gig RAM. By the way, you can also install OS X on an external firewire hard disk, and use the built-in HDD for Windows and Linux only, that'll give you more space. They already sell external 500 GB drives for around 100 Euros, so it's not a big investment, but worth every cent. |
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| And you can boot readily and do all updates and other installations properly from the external OSX drive? |
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| Yep. I run Leopard and everything else exclusively from the external hard disk. The system does not make any difference at all between the internal and the external hard disk(s). Only when you partition the hard disk, you have to make sure that you use the write signatures ('GUID' on Intel Macs, for example), but the Disk Utility shows you the options so it's almost a no-brainer. Once the OS is installed, you can use System Preferences/Startup Disk to permanently mark the external disk as your primary boot volume or you can press the Option(Alt) key when booting your Mac and then select the external disk when the Boot Manager appears. Actually, Macs fully support external hard disks in that way since ages. You can even connect a complete Mac in so-called 'target mode' to another Mac via Firewire and the other machine would see it as an external hard disk (very practical and fast for transferring your stuff to a new machine). I still haven't successfully installed GNU/Linux on an external hard disk, though. The last time I tried, Linux killed my Windows partition, and I did not have enough interest to find a solution. |
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| If I was in your situation I would choose Vista above XP. I noticed that one game I'm working on had a sound delay under Vista, this was easy to fix, but if your bmax game works under Vista, it will work under XP as well. What is important as well is the security stuff in Vista, like the UAC (User Account Control)) which has some troubles with older games when activated (this is activated standard in Vista) so they won't run at all. And you can boot readily and do all updates and other installations properly from the external OSX drive? just hold option key and select the disk with the correct operating system you want to boot. |
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| How long do you think XP is going to be a viable platform for developing BlitzMax apps? - Microsoft will continue to release critical updates for XP until some time in 2014, when the extended support phase ends - There are many people rabidly anti-vista - ergo, XP isn't going to go anywhere soon. Right now, there's still more XPers than Vista users out there, so it will continue to be a viable platform for the forseeable future. However: Pretty much anything that you create with blitzmax that'll work with Vista, will also work with XP, while that's not necessarily so the other way around. (Vista is much pickier in where you store your files, etc.) Fro that point of view, using Vista to develop on might be -smarter- than using XP, regardless of your personal feelings for one over the other. |
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| I chose Vista. |
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