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Consistant issues with Boot Camp on Start up

Paul Caldwell

New member
After having this machine up now for a couple of weeks, I can now safely state that the hand shake between the Mac EFI and XP is not that clean.

My experience is on the XP windows side, I am still a mac Novice.


The two main concerns I have is that on about 1/2 of all start up boots, after XP paints the Main screen, the machine will lock up. You have no keyboard or mouse and the only way to get out is a hard power off. Most of the times after this the machine will come up fine and work in XP with no other issues, (besides excessive heat which only seems to happen when the AC adapter is being used). If you have worked around XP any, you know that this is not a good thing to do with this OS, i.e a hard power off without a orderly shutdown. Eventually a file or two will get stepped on and you will more than likely get a corrupt load. Also as you start to load more programs onto the machine the risk of getting them corrupted will also increase.

The other issue is even more interesting. Every so often on start up, (new boot from a powered off state or a restart both in XP) the machine will start to load into XP, begin to paint the main Windows XP screen (black with Windows XP) and then stop. The LCD goes blank and basically the machine powers off. When this first happened I thought my battery had run down but I checked it and it had plenty of charge. This problem IMO is much worse in that you can't power the machine back up until you take the battery out. I have had this happen with the machine running on battery and on the AC adatper. Note you can't even get the machine to come back up under the mac side until the battery is pulled. Whatever happens pulls the power totally from the board and by pulling the battery you are basically doing a reset.

Net, neither is a good thing and I can see why Apple says don't run production on boot camp. I still may consider parrallels but I keep hearing that you don't get the full potenital of the machine, however I also feel that you would have a more stable environment to work with.

I can also confirm again that the heat issue is mainly a issue of having the AC adatper in use on the XP side. This morning I have had this machine up for over 40 minutes and the heat is very very minor but if I plugged in the AC adatper, that would change quickly.

Maybe Apple reads some of these type of posts, as currently there really isn't much of a way to get them the real feedback they need.

Paul Caldwell
 

Alain Briot

pro member
Have you tried Parallels? It is slightly slower than BootCamp but much more reliable and practical. For one thing, you can run Mac OSX and Windows at the same time. No need to reboot to go from one to the other.
 

Paul Caldwell

New member
Hello Alain,

No, I haven't tried it yet but based on the experiences I continue to have with XP under Boot Camp, I may be soon.

I originally stayed away from parrellels as the reports I read stated that you didn't get the best performance for XP and I have had experience with the Old Virtual PC software and didn't like that either.

I reloaded the entire machine the other night, included deleting the entire Boot Camp XP partition and reloaded with a different XP CD. Problems are still there, but not quite as bad. The machine will come up clean 85% of the time and once up seems fine. I only have issues on boot. And these IMO are due to the display driver.

Still my single biggest issue is the heat output, just way to hot. XP seems slightly hotter than the mac side. BTW I will be interested in hearing if you new 17" (I believe I read you are getting a new MacBookPro with the Glossy Screen) is in relation to heat output.

Thanks
Paul C.
 

Alain Briot

pro member
Paul,

I just got an Apple Pro Book and if I run Windows on it I will try Parallels first. This is what Michael Reichman is using, and I have heard only good things about it except that it is a little slower than BootCamp. What I am hearing is that it is a lot more user friendly. The speed loss is the only drawback although I don't know how much speed is lost really.

They have a trial version: http://www.parallels.com/
 
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