Anyone running XP on the new Macs?

[Anonymous]

I need to get a new laptop, and I've been very disappointed with the last few I've used. They all seem to end up running too hot, to the point where they just bake themselves and shut down. Obviously, this is annoying when playing online poker.

I was thinking of getting one of the new MacBooks (they also run hot, but seem to be built to handle it--after all, they run 24/7 in those Apple stores), and putting a pretty large Windows partition on it. Kinda weird maybe, but this way, I'd get a chance to play around with OS X a bit, and would have a reliable machine for my Windows experience also (interpret that "Windows experience" part there to mean online poker .....).

Has anyone tried this? Just wanted to find out if there are any specific online poker-type hitches with XP on Mac.

Thanks for any help.

[boost]

do you play with your laptop on your couch or on your bed? The padding in furniture acts as the perfect insulator and just holds all the laptops heat directly below it. You might as well have a stove as your desk, with the burners all turned on high. If its just on your desk, then I dont know what to tell you(I have no expierence with macs, and know nothing about emulating windows on a mac).

[bigred]

do you play with your laptop on your couch or on your bed? The padding in furniture acts as the perfect insulator and just holds all the laptops heat directly below it. You might as well have a stove as your desk, with the burners all turned on high. If its just on your desk, then I dont know what to tell you(I have no expierence with macs, and know nothing about emulating windows on a mac).

I just put my laptop on boost's head while I play, though he complains about the heat sometimes.

[geoffm33]

How much were you looking to spend on a laptop? The MacBook starts at $2K. If you just surf porn and play online poker (like me) then you don't need to spend much more than a grand on a laptop.

That being said, if you have no issues with dropping 2 grand on a MacBook (or were looking to spend nearly that on a PC laptop), go for it. Looks pretty kick ass and the fact you can boot into XP is pretty intruiging.

You may even be able to get away with running Virtual PC inside OSX to play poker. That way you don't have to dual boot just to play poker.

[a500lbgorilla]

oh, i thought this was steel wheel who used to post many months ago.

I was about to make this post

"hole-e crap, how long has it been since you last posted?"

and the answer would have been several months.

Cool name

[Anonymous]

No, I'm a new post-er here..no relation to anyone else...

I'm aware that use of a laptop in bed will cook a laptop...I don't do that. Just having the laptop sitting on a desk or snack table, I'll frequently encounter this problem. Have a couple of poker clients going, Firefox with a few tabs, and little else, and my machine will just die. I've even tried using one of those "laptop cooling pads"--no help. In fact, my results with the cooling pad seem to be worse, if that's possible.

I need my laptop for a little more than "surfing porn" and playing poker--I trade online, too, so when I'm in Vegas for the WSOP, I'll need something a little more reliable (and I don't mind spending the bucks). That's why the Apple appealed to me--they seem to run pretty hot, but they appear to be more heat sink oriented, rather than relying on fans for cooling. Just seemed like overall, they might be designed a bit better.

btw, runing virtualized Windows within OS X is already possible. But when you run the virtual machine, the sound doesn't get re-routed out to the host machine. Would be a little difficult to play online without the audio alerts when the action was on you.

I had been toying with getting a decent Windows laptop (like a Lenovo or Sony maybe) and dual-booting with Linux, to have a little hacking fun and learn something new. But when I saw the new Apples in the store the other day, I started thinking about this as an alternative.

If anyone else has any ideas, let me know, thanks.

[geoffm33]

btw, runing virtualized Windows within OS X is already possible. But when you run the virtual machine, the sound doesn't get re-routed out to the host machine. Would be a little difficult to play online without the audio alerts when the action was on you.

I was thinking more along the lines of it may now be desireable to run xp virtualized. It's always been sluggish but with the speed increase in the processor/system bus/disks it may be pretty responsive. And when Office Mac is release as a Universal Binary (or optimized for Intel) then it'll be faster.

Good point about the sound, that would be a non starter for me.