I am freshman and my professor told us that we were going to need a laptop to work on some aerospace designs. The thing is that since I will have to install copy of AutoCAD 2007 on the laptop I don’t know if the new Macs support it. The new Macs I’m talking about have the new Intel CPU’s capable of running the Tiger OS and Windows. Basically can the new Macs run AutoCAD?
Thanks for reading
If it can run Windows, it can run Acad.
So I guess its settled… Mac it is!
You can do it three ways at the moment.
One is via virtualization where you run Windows underneath OS X. Some people say Autocad runs ok for them this way. This saves dual booting. Downsides are it’s limited to the VM resources (lower Ram etc) and at the moment it lacks hardware graphics acceleration.
The second option is Crossover, which lets you run Windows programs directly in OS X. This means no dual booting and no VM limitations. The downside here is that Crossover is not running Windows and so it doesn’t always work properly. It does seem to support 3D though so I would definitely give it a go.
The third option is bootcamp, which just installs Windows like you would on any other PC. Bootcamp is just a set of drivers to support the older bios method that Windows uses. OS X uses EFI on the Intel machines. This runs all Windows programs just as a PC would and people are quite happily running Autocad on it:
The downsides here are having to partition your hard drive and dual boot.
Thanks for the advice osxrules. One thing I’m not sure is the hard drive should I get the 100 GB or the 120GB since I’ll be dual booting.
Windows XP ~23GB ( at least on my PC)
Mac ox s ~ ?GB ( what is typical?)
Boot Camp ~ 10GB ( what their site says)
TOTAL: at least 33 GB needed which leaves about 67 GB left. Is this enough? If it is i’ll get the 100 GB HD
Finally, when they mention dual core should I muliply the 2.00 GHz by 2 or is it already included in there?
Sorry if it’s kinda confusing but I’h grateful people are helping me!
EDIT: is there a way that I can transfer windows to the Mac somehow, since I already have a PC at home.
sorry double post
sorry double post
by dual cpu’s they mean that there are 2x 2ghz cpu’s for example running on the machine simontaniously (but for some reason they l2 cache size is very small) i dont know how windows can take up 23 gig on your machine, that seems to be a bit to much…
So do you think that the 100 GB HD is enough?About how much does os x consume?
OSX itself doesnt consume more then like 3 gigs of space, windows takes up about the same ammount… and ten autocad takes up another few… 101 gigs should be more then enough in my opinion
Boot Camp doesn’t take up 10GB, that’s the minimum size of the partition you will be allowed so you can put all your Windows stuff on it. In your case, you’d need to make that partition about 30GB if your current XP is 23GB. Boot Camp lets you partition dynamically so you can do this after OS X is installed, just be careful not to format the wrong partition (one reason it’s good to have them different sizes).
The OS X installation has all the ilife software for movies and audio mixing. Garageband alone gives you 3GB of audio loops. A typical OS X installation takes up about 15-20GB space. I have a 60GB drive and in real terms, that’s only 55GB and my machine had 40GB left after installation. After cleaning some stuff off that I didn’t use, I got the installation down to under 10GB leaving around 45GB free.
When I installed the stuff I needed, the free space went to about 30GB. If you assume that XP and OS X will take up roughly the same, you are talking about 60GB used and that will realistically leave you with 35GB free.
For me personally, I’d say that 100GB would be enough. If you are going to use Windows a lot, I’d probably split it 60GB for OS X and 40GB for Windows. Like I say, I’m getting by fine with my 60GB drive for OS X and I still have a lot of the ilife stuff.
Yeah, loads of people get that confused. Especially now that they have introduced Core 2 Duo, which is actually just dual core but people wonder if it is 2 x Core Duo = 4 processors. It’s really gonna mess people up when they introduce dual Core 2 Duo.
Core Duo = one physical processor with 2 cores so still 2 processing units.
Core 2 Duo = one physical processor with 2 cores but the newer model (version 2)
dual Core 2 Duo would be two physical processors, each with 2 cores = 4 processing units.
You can transfer your stuff but I’m not sure if you can tranfer your system. I’d personally go for a clean install to help make sure no spyware etc is in there. You can use software like this to help:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2018628,00.asp
Remember for Boot Camp, you need an SP2 XP installation disc. You can’t use a standard XP CD and update to SP2.
2MB shared doesn’t seem that small for a laptop. I’ve only seen bigger in Conroe, which has a 4MB shared L2 cache and that apparently takes up half the size of the processor.
Thanks for the replies. Two more questions, since the only reason I’ll be using Windows is AutoCad 2007, I’ll have to buy a two button mouse with a scroll wheel. But is the Mac Book Pro compatible with it?. I’m pretty sure it is since will be running Windows and Window is compatible. Finally does Boot Camp accept the installation on Windows XP Home SP/2?
Thanks for the in depth explanations guys.
any system should run a USB mouce (if it has a usb port)
i personaly got my laptop without a mouce, it has a 101 keybord integrated with the numpad and all
and OSXRULES the standart l2 cache for a laptop nowdays is 2x512
Yeah, I use a Microsoft 4-button notebook mouse with my Mac and it works fine. Operating systems generally support the main 3 buttons plus scroll wheel by default. For any extra buttons, you usually need to install software. My Microsoft mouse works fine with the scroll wheel and everything in Parallels under XP Pro without software.
Yes.
Uh huh. But 2 x 512k = 1 MB and 2MB > 1MB.
Macs have always quietly supported two- and three-button mice. I don’t know why they continue to ship single-button mice, but I use a (gasp!) Microsoft optical wheel-mouse with my machines and it all works great.
I strongly recommend investing in a USB 2.0 or (better…) FireWire external hard drive. From the very outset, use external drives to make backups of your information. And, they’re just as fast as anything built-in.
As for my various Macintoshes (and I’ve got machines of all types here … Mac, Linux, Windoze, you name it… ), well, “I’ve rode 'em hard and put 'em up wet,” and they’ve never failed to do whatever I asked. Extremely satisfied. Superbly engineered and reliable machines.