I’ve been fiddling with Boot Camp on a MacBook Pro 2GHz since its release, and I’m ready to settle in: I can just expect games to work with all their gee-whizardry enabled and the highest widescreen resolution. Half-Life 2, Dungeon Siege II, Tomb Raider: Legend, and Oblivion: all working wonderfully. The one question remains: which of the zillion MMORPGs whose doors are now opened do I want to explore? (Yes, I play World of Warcraft, and yes, I do so only under OS X).
I’ve given up on the wireless connection for anything but casual online browsing or downloads (such as small patches) - various folks have suggested Windows XP’s wireless capabilities are “flaky”, and I’ve no real desire to fix it when I can wire into my router easily enough. Last night, I started a free trial of R.O.S.E. Online (which is at least entertaining enough to want me to play for a second day), and I’m debating City of Villains and this week’s Auto Assault (though, fie!, do I wish there were demos).
My final notes on the Boot Camp experience (see my previous posts for more):
remapkey.exe, a utility that will allow you to remap keys (so that you can “Delete” on a MacBook Pro, where the existing Delete mimicks Backspace), isn’t actually included in Windows XP, as I originally assumed. Instead, it’s part of some Windows utility/resource pack, along with a bunch of other junk. Worried about hard drive space (see below), it’s relatively easy to find a standalone copy of the .exe on Google, and I can confirm it does what it professes.- I originally chose 25 GB for the size of my Windows partition, so that I could read and write to it from OS X (where I’d be downloading demos and so forth whilst I accomplished real work). With three recent games installed, however, I’m already down to only 10 GB left, which is a bit less than I had hoped for. Granted, “how many games can you play at once?” and all, but still, a bit disconcerting. Hopefully Leopard has some way of writing NTFS filesystems.
- Oddly, when I plug in my headphones to the MacBook Pro running Windows XP, sound will continue to spit out of the laptop speakers. I discovered this accidentally when I was kicked out of the local Borders - apparently, audio erotica is not appropriate whilst enjoying a tasty cheesecake at their cafe. Explanations that I was working on my memoirs, How I Learned Romance From Big Brown Riding Hoof, persuaded them little.
Any questions?
Aw man, that's a genius Borders story :) Apple did mention the issue in the notes. I guess it needs to be in bigger writing :)
did you really get kicked out of borders? haha!
In reference to your note that you are already running low on disk space in your Windows partition, do you know if it is possible to resize partitions on a Mac without having to nuke the existing ones? Evidentially the Boot Camp application is able to do this in order to create the initial Windows partition but I wonder if it is possible to resize it later. Is there something like Partition Magic on a Mac to do this job? I've been using a PowerBook for the the last 3-years but have never needed to do anything like this.
I know that Boot Camp can revert the created Windows partition and resize the Mac partition back to 100%, but I don't believe it can dynamically resize the two partitions it has created. As for a Partition Magic clone, I'd recommend the GParted/LiveCD combo - while I haven't actually used it on a Mac yet, I've had grande success with it on resizing Linux/Windows dualboot partitions. For Mac-only stuff, supposedly iPartition can do the same thing, but I've not touched it.
I work on a 15" TiBook and Alienware XP machine side-by-side day in and day out. You are 100% correct that wireless on WinXP is flakey at best. Compared to my trusty old TiBook, I find myself constantly "repairing" the wireless connection in XP (whatever "repair" means for buggy software). Keep up the postings, love the updates.
If you're into SciFi, might want to check out EVE on-line(eve-online.com).
Ha! Nice work with the Border's reference. I found it very amusing.
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Ha! Nice work with the Border's reference. I found it very amusing.