Last summer I decided to buy a MacBook Pro as my new laptop. And I have to say. I have become a fan of the Apple hardware. But as a .NET developer I’m ofcourse interested in the Windows capabilities. So here are my notes :
Setting up and using boot camp is easy. I experienced some problems during booting. Occasionally my machine froze during startup. Mostly just before the Windows XP logo appears. I never had any dataloss and simply turning the Macbook on and off again solves the problem.
The frequency? Well, lets say one in 10. These ‘crashes’ didn’t gave a very good feeling about the whole boot camp (beta) so…
last week I switched to Leopard. After a complete backup of both my partitions I decided to completly reinstall my machine. Deleted all partitions, installed Leopard, did updates, configured boot camp, installed windows XP SP2 and all the updates.
And guess what… jip.. The occasional hangs are still there.
I also considered running Windows using VMware Fusion or Parallels instead of bootcamp. But my general impression was that running virtual machines under OS X is too slow to be used for .NET development.
Don’t get me wrong. Both Parallels and VMWare Fusion are great products. But when I assign 1.5Gb of memory to the virtual machine image and I startup my typical development (Visual studio, SQL server, webserver) I don’t find the GUI response enough to be used as developent envirnoment. My menu’s, intelli-sense need to fly. I hate it when I need to wait for a menu to pop-up or text to appear on my screen.
Hope this information helps.
