1) Actually, besides the time I used it for the short (and I know, not so good) I made, never
. I did try to install Vista Beta2, but there's some sort of bug in it so that it only works if Vista is installed on your first partition. In my case, that would mean uninstalling OSX, and that's
not something I'm even considering
.
2) Not really bad. The far back left side tends to run quite hot, depending on what you're doing. If you're really using the CPU power for a while, it almost gets uncomfortable to hold there. But since you only really do that just to check on the actual heat, it's not a big concern. At least not for me.
3) Using BootCamp, you basically have just one mouse button. There's a small tool (definitely made by an older generation mac fan!) that allows you to ctrl+click as a right click, but that's just a pain in the ass. I'm in fact trying out Parallels as we speak, and the mouse settings you've set in OSX work just the same in Windows XP! So in my case, one tap on the trackpad is left mouse button click and one tap with two fingers on the trackpad is right click. Scrolling (tap and hold 2 fingers on the trackstick, then move) doesn't work in XP though.
4) Probably, I remember on my 'old' XP desktop Steam really knew how to eat up my CPU and RAM. Although I've got 1.25GB of RAM in my MacBook, I suspect steam might want just a bit more. Then again, all the kickass HL2 effects didn't work either, so the 3D card also plays a big role.
I'm checking out the speed and usability of XP via Parallels right now, and I'll let you know how that works. It's pretty handy to have both systems running at the same time, though I doubt games will be playable via this... Only time (and me
) will tell!
fix: Apologies, scrolling DOES work in XP
.
Update: Well, I can't get the network to work in Parallels, must be doing something wrong somewhere... Anyway, I installed Warcraft 3 to try out, but when I try to open the game, it stops at the splash screen... nothing after that. Weird huh? So, gaming via Parallels is most likely a no-go.