With the upgrade to Leopard on my laptop I am trying to address as many pain points as possible. I started with a bigger hard drive and a clean install to make room and remove clutter. As I rebuild my system I am thinking about my needs and desires with each piece of software I install.
The biggest change is that I am moving to Boot Camp. Instead of installing Windows in a virtual machine I am going to install it directly onto it’s own partition. I will still be able to open Windows with Parallels. I plan to boot directly into Windows for those 8 hour stretches on Java Development on a Windows system talking to SQL Server. No reason to try and do that in a virtual machine.
I am also moving to a 64bit version of Windows XP. The Core2Duo chip in my MBP is a 64bit chip. Leopard is 64bit (which should be faster at the OS level). My hope is that running XP in 64bit will squeeze that extra little bit of performance out of it. As an added bonus, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (the free one) can also run 64bit.
UPDATE: Apparently BootCamp does not run 64bit versions of the Windows operating systems. I am going to install XP64 in Parallels, and XP Pro in BootCamp and see which is better to use.
UPDATE 2: Ok FINE! So Parallels can’t run XP 64 either. Thinking about trying Vista just for the hell of it.
