After a few days of messing with Boot Camp on my Mac Mini, I decided it was time to remove it.
No, I’m not giving in to the peer pressure of friends, coworkers, and loved ones (well, one specific fangirl loved one)… I decided the experiment was over.
A big contributing factor was the Mini’s performance with Adobe Audition. I used it to mix the latest Cheap Date podcast, and I was very unimpressed with its performance. The main issue was that scrolling across the project was slow and choppy, probably due to the video card/drivers built into the Mini. It looked like I was running it on Windows98. (As a reminder, my Mac Mini is a Core Duo with 2 GB of memory.) To be fair, when it came time to crunch the project down to its final MP3 file, the Mini finished up in about half the time my regular PC (with an Athlon 1700+ processor and 768 MB of memory) usually does it.
Other things that really bothered me were the fact that the clock always reset itself to 5 hours ahead (corresponding with GMT) every time I booted into XP, and the fact that it couldn’t see the OSX side of my Mini. This latter point is probably a blessing, because otherwise I would be worried that my OSX partition would be subject to viruses brought in while running XP.
Then there’s the fact that I had to shut all the way down and bring the machine all the way back up every time I wanted to switch environments. It’s not a very efficient model in which to operate.
Finally, there’s the question of why I bought a Mac in the first place: why run Windows on this machine when it’s designed to run something better?
The decision has been made. Boot Camp will be removed from my Mini over the weekend.