My wife does a lot of freelance work and we're upgrading her laptop to a new 2.5ghz macbook pro with 4 gigs of ram and a nvidia 8600m GT with 512mb.

Anyways, couple questions. I've been out of the PC world for a longtime. Since we're spending a fortune on this computer, I thought I'd put bootcamp on it and see how Age of Conan runs on it.

Questions I have are:

1) Should I go with XP or Vista? If Vista, should I go the home edition or the ultimate? I've not used Vista at all, since I'm on a macbook pro through work as well.

2) How well will this computer play Conan with the video card that I mentioned? the 8600m gt w/512mb..?

Thanks in advance!

Since when do you get an OS option? They only put Vista on pre-builts these days.

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Marauder Harabakc Goat

It doesn't come with a Windows OS, so I'll be buying a non-upgraded version of windows. I didn't think about whether XP is even purchasable anymore. Bleh.

Vista should run pretty nicely on that machine, though I'd still be inclined to install XP if you're just going to be using it for gaming.

You may also want to look into an emulation tool like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop to run Windows without rebooting the Mac.

The emulation options are great for non-gaming software, especially since either parallels or vmware can load your windows install and run it "in a box"

I'd personally go with XP, I've heard of issues with boot camp and vista.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I use parallels on my work machine, and it's not really for gaming, though it runs windows just fine for work related apps. Kind of an amazing program, actually.

The only thing i'll be using windows for is gaming.

hahaha he's buying a Mac, read the first post. he just want to know which windows he should install on it to Dual boot and play games.

Well Boot Camp now support Vista 64bit so with 4GB of ram that would be my choice. The Vista 64bit drivers are a lot better than what they used to be at release. I currently use XP on my machine but i have a Vista 64 hard drive ready and working great I am just not ready to re-install all my shit just yet, that's why I still use XP.

But whatever version you chose I recomend the Nvidia 175.16 drivers instead of the Apple supplied drivers for the 8600GT. Install windows, install the boot camp drivers, install the Nvidia drivers.

Also be aware that you might have problem booting Vista x64 with 4GB of ram installed and instead get blue screen. There is a Microsoft patch to apply if you have that problem. Install Windows with 2GB, apply the patch then install the other 2GB to get over the problem.

Cant wait to have the Conan DX10 client this fall.

Thanks, appreciate the advice.

Hopefully I won't drop $300 on all this extra shit only to have Conan run like ass on that setup. Still, seems better to drop $300 than try to spec out a brand new PC to only play a few mmo's on.

My curreny macbook pro runs WoW like a champ even in OS X.

They werent pulling XP till june, and they are talking about pushing that back again.

VMWare Fusion 4tw. Those guys have been doing PC-based VMs for a long time and I have used a number of their products. I bought VMWare Fusion when I got my MacBook and I'm running XP with it. Since my main desktop is now running Ubuntu and WoW with wine, anything else I had to use Windows to do is being done in that VM, and it does it well. I do have 4 GB of RAM which I am sure helps.

Got the machine, put Vista 64 on it and it works great. AOC runs like a champ on high detail, and WoW is a dream. Thanks for the help!