You didn't start anything. There are just a lot of folks out there with an attitude something like (to grossly paraphrase the sentiment), "What I have is best and therefore it is the only possible choice for the entire universe, anyone who disagrees is a pathetic imbecile, and I just have to tell the world about it." Even if the posts are mild, those kind of things generally escalate really fast so we try to nip them in the bud. We don't do platform wars here. Anyway, it wasn't you and no biggie -- just some of the usual housekeeping.

I think XP Pro OEM would be around $199. Fry's Online doesn't list the OEM versions, but that's the cost of the regular XP Pro upgrade, so should be about what the store is charging for the full OEM version over in the computer section (not the boxed retail versions in the software section).

As for Vista, personally I'm still waiting a while after SP1 is released to see how things go.

Ah, 199.

What about home edition?

There are a lot of online stores selling home edition with SP2 for under $100. I had home edition on the dying PC, and it's fine, don't seem to need pro.

Take a look at this:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Looks cool, but I thought Parallels already had a file sharing feature for going between the two?

Actually, yes, you're correct.

OEM for XP Home is listed at $100 or so. Will that cut it?

Ok, kids. . .the dream is happening. I got my Windows XP with SP2, OEM (around $100), put it in, and I'm running windows as I type this in OSX. It did NOT ask me to reactivate. . .I saw a I message about it, but it hasn't asked me anything yet. Maybe next time I start Windows it will? Anyway, seems to be working fine. Windows magically found my internet connection so I didn't have to set it up again, so now I can connect through either OSX or Win XP.


I'm writing this later than the above paragraph. The dream isn't QUITE as sexy as I thought, yet. I forgot about the fact that parallels doesn't recognize firewire (I thought I read there was some workaround for this, though?). Futhermore, apparently, if you have a firewire device hooked up to your mac and attempt to start parallels, it thinks it's another windows partition and won't start. If it's already running and you attach a firewire device, no problem.

Also, can't connect to the net in boot camp, but I can, even in Windows, in parallel. Weird, eh?

In boot camp, everything is stretched to fill the mac's 16:9 screen, even in programs. So for instance, in Vegas, a 4:3 project looks like 16:9. I don't know if there's a fix for this? And, again, in boot camp, whenever you move a window around, it's really sluggish. . .you can actually see it redrawing the windows as you move them across the screen.

And, it seems to have issues keeping accurate time. I know I set the time when I first installed Windows, but for it then reset, and then did it again recently. Fixable?

Other than all that, it seems to work pretty smoothly so far.

Oh, and I was wrong about the activation . It did ask to be activated, but no problems there. I went online via Parallels and it was all good.

Okay, I lied again. It does need to be activated twice, once for parallels and once for boot camp. Apparently, to the computer, they're two different machines. I don't think it matters which order you do it in, but it MUST be done twice. This is a real issue if you get OEM software, as the product key can only be activated once. I was lucky the code from my old PC worked when I was asked to reactivate. But the rest of you BE CAREFUL!