A Weekend with an XP iMac

This weekend, I conducted a little experiment. Iused Boot Camp to boot my 17-inch 1.83GHz iMac Core Duo with 2G of RAM and an external 24-inch monitor in Windows XPand then I forced myself to remain in XP. I didn't reboot into OS X. I tead, I explored the Windows performance on themachine. Overall, I have to admit, it was a positive experience. I still prefer OS X, but I can now see the advantagesto booting into XP from time to time.

One odd thing that I wa 't expecting was that I didn't find myselfloathing Windows quite as much. Something about ru ing it quickly on my nice iMac made it more pleasant than all of myprevious experiences ru ing XP on various PC boxes. It's still the fastest I've ever seen Windows perform. Half of thisis probably that I didn't load it down with lots of crap programs, and I had it properly protected immediately afteri tall with virus, firewall, and yware protection.

There were negative a ects to the experience. Ithard crashed at least 5 times on me this weekend. This mostly ha ened when I was i talling something...
Moreafter the jump...
Skype didn't i tall the first time I tried. One time, however, it crashed on startup as Gizmo Project wasloading. Disabling Gizmo Project load on start up fixed the problem.

I managed to get Firefox ru ingnicely, Gaim i talled for chat, and Open Office i talled, so that I more or le had all the work environmentnece ities. Also, several of the Windows only programs and services that I have to acce for work (and for which Ikeep a Dell laptop lying around) i talled easily on the iMac ru ing XP, so I no longer have to leave my iMac and usethe Dell to get my work done. That's the landslide benefit of Boot Camp right there.

However, the coolestpart, and the thing that will keep me booting into XP more often than I normally would, is the games. Saturday, I ranout to the store and bought Guild Wars, The Battle for Middle Earth, and Halo. They all run very fastand nicely on the iMac XP. The only slow down I experienced was when battling the very cinematic and fire-breathingBalrog while playing The Battle For Middle Earth, ru ing it fullscreen 1600x1200 with the high detailsettings on the external 24-inch monitor. After I dro ed down the settings a bit, it played fine and I imagine that ifI were ru ing it on the iMac's default screen there wouldn't have been any i ue.

Also a slight note,ru ing two monitors off of the iMac in XP did create a few visual %26quot ur quot; every once in a while, where bothscree would flicker slightly. This usually only occured when I wa 't actively doing anything on the machine. As ifthe scree aver was thinking about kicking in, but decided not to.

Also, since Flip4Mac i 't currentlyi talling on my Intel Mac, if I need to view Windows Media Player content on my Mac, rebooting into Windows seems tobe the only way to do so.

So what's my end verdict: if you've been keeping a cra y Windows machine around,get rid of it. Get a copy of XP and i tall it on your Intel Mac. Get it for the workday bits that you are forced touse Windows for and keep it for the games.