Thanks very much for your prompt, expert assistance. You’ve helped me immensely.

Got a tip jar/wishlist?

Best,

Jamie

My machines:

17″ MacBoook Pro, 4GB RAM, 2.6Ghz Core 2 Duo, 256 MB dedicated Nvidia card.

13″ Unibody MacBook, 4GB RAM, 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo, Nvidia integrated graphics

I compared them here: http://devinsblog.com/2008/11/13/unibody-macbook-vs-macbook-pro-windows-experience-index/

I find that the MacBook is great for me – easily portable and very speedy. The graphics card really pulls its weight as well. I’d say that Apple’s rating of the graphics card being 80% as powerful as the MacBook Pro is fairly accurate. If you’re not playing games on your MacBook you’ll be more than fine with the GPU they provided (I’ve played call of duty on it and been fairly impressed).

I think that you would be satisfied running Fusion, XP and Visual Studio on a MacBook. Here are my cautions though: It IS going to be noticeably slower than running Windows through Boot Camp, especially during loading processes (loading Windows, loading Visual Studio). However, I doubt that it would be noticeably slower than running Fusion on the MacBook Pro. Compiling applications, debugging them, etc, has been a very positive experience on the MacBook and there aren’t any noticeable performance drops there.

The biggest issue for me with the MacBook is that when I’m not at work or home where I can plug into an external monitor, the 13″ screen is just not very conducive to development. I’m a software developer and I run VS2008 100% of the time on my MacBook Pro (through Boot Camp), and moving my development environment to a 13″ screen is madness.

I’m running Fusion off of my Boot Camp partition with 80Gb HD space and 1Gb of RAM. Also note that I have been running Vista, which is much more of a resource hog than XP. You would likely see a noticeable performance increase compared to my setup. Running Fusion all day long has not been a problem either. It hasn’t affected my Mac OS performance at all.

My personal preference – IF you have an external screen, buy the MacBook, you won’t have any regrets on the performance for software development.

Thanks very much for posting this; If you have a second for a question or two, I’d be much obliged. I run xp under parallels 3 on a black macbook (core 2 duo/2GB memory, of which 500MB for XP), and it’s not very zippy.

I am looking into setting myself up almost exactly the same way, with: a new machine, fusion, Visual Studio 2008 and XP. Games don’t matter to me; I won’t be editing photos or video, but I’ll be running XP and VS.NET 100% of the time.

1. Do you wish you had more firepower, like the dedicated GPU, faster bus/hard drive on the macbook pro, or are you comfortable with the macbook?

2. How much HD space/memory are you allocating to Fusion?

Thanks!

Jamie