Much to my surprise, the copy of Windows XP Home Edition (with SP2 ‘natch) arrived on Saturday, a lot earlier than I expected. Thanks to a special program I have access to, I was able to buy a full retail version of it for a mere $64. My big concern was that two processors aren’t supported in the Home edition. I could never get confirmation that I wouldn’t need Professional for my Mac Pro.
It turns out that Home works absolutely perfectly on Mac Pros. Tell your friends. As the hard drive I planned on dedicating to Windows XP hadn’t arrived, I moved the data from the stock drive I was using for EyeTV recordings onto an external and fired up Boot Camp. Other than some confusion about which partition to install on, installation went through without a hitch.
My two displays were mirrored until I installed the Boot Camp supplied drivers and then everything worked great. Except for one thing. Windows doesn’t use the hard drive in DMA mode, making disk access… very… slow. That’s not a huge problem unless you need virtual memory at some point. If you do, it becomes a big issue. That brings me full circle to needing more RAM.
I installed Doom 3 (bought at Wally World for a mere $20), which ran wonderfully in Windows. I’ll end up wiping it out anyway because I’ll need to reinstall onto the hard drive arriving tomorrow. For that reason, I didn’t activate Windows. Let me tell you, Windows gets very cranky when you don’t activate it.
I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts later.
I had no doubt that XP Home would work on the Mac Pros, but do you really see all four cores? Everything I've read has suggested that although XP Home supports multiple cores, you need XP Pro to see more than two CPUs.
You can see how many cores are supported by viewing Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del)
It shows two cores, so it ignores the second processor entirely.
if it only shows 2 cores when booted into windows...
i wonder how the workload is spread out when you run parallels or VMware when X uses all of them.
make make for a good test
I've read that Parallels uses only a single CPU per virtual machine (I suspect because each virtual machine is single threaded).
I'd buy Parallels, but I'd like to save up for some RAM first.