Quake3World

Just wondering what the feasibility of this is nowadays, I think the mac mini is on intel chips now?

My sister's a computing troglodyte, and not really willing to learn. She needs something cheap and able to last her a few years. She's got broadband and most of her activities on the PC are just browsing, chatting, a bit of email.

Would a mac mini dual booting XP be a good choice? They're not prohibitively expensive.

On the other hand I could set her up with a cheapass PC build, but the macs seem just as good a choice and more stylish.

You could get it to boot XP and run software, but as far as support goes there may be some limitations. For her uses I'd say it would work well, but for anything that's system-intensive or requires specific API support and driver integration, yadda yadda I'd say its best to hold off for now. That's besides the point though. For her, I'd do it.

What about one of the virtualisation packages?

Aren't those prohibitively expensive?

Also I don't quite understand what the point would be... May as well just buy a regular PC in that case.

My plan would be to start her off on the mac software but if it didn't work out transition to XP is an option.

Virtualization allows mac and pc software to run simultaneously at nearly full speed. The costs are more, and there are still features to be desired as well as bugs to be weeded out, but I think its the way of the future.

Still, for now, Boot Camp will do a great job.

There's something like VMWare which costs 50 bucks or so. It's what I'd use to avoid the dual boot.

Parallels Virtual Machine is about that price as well.

That's what I was thinking of. I couldn't remember the name. There's a 30 day demo available which I've ran on an iMac.

How well'd it run?

I didn't have any OS handy to try it out but it booted into a bios. The app itself is a UNIX port as it's using TK, or something similar, for its user interface.

When I get myself an Intel Mac, as opposed to the two I have at work, I'll get some virtualization software.

I've got one of the new intel mini's, the cheapo one with a core solo and 512 megs of RAM. Parallels Runs pretty poorly, but then again I can only give the Virtual Machine for XP 384 megs of RAM. If I do give it the max amount of RAM, OS X weeps tears of spinning beachballs. Boot Camp is the much better alternative if performance is your goal, since its straight XP, no virtualization and no loss of hardware performance.

VMWare and MS Virtual Server are free now if anyone hasn't noticed...