XP on a Macbook Pro

So I’ve finally had a chance to put Windows XP on this computer, and I have good and bad things to report.

The good side of the coin is that the OS runs fine. Windows feels just like Windows feels, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the outside of this computer has a big apple logo on it, you’d think you were running any ol’ PC. Other good news is that the games I wanted to run in Windows run alright, but I haven’t seen the performance that I thought I would. Half Life 2, for example, runs good…once it loads. I don’t know what it is, but just loading the title screen takes 30+ seconds, and I definitely don’t think that it should. Once you get into the game, though, it runs fine with all of the settings jacked to max save for the resolution. I couldn’t run it super smooth at 1440×900, so I took the second best option.

There have been snags, though, with some of my older games (but not necessarily the ones you’d expect). I tried to play Battlefield 1942, and it runs fine, but newer Rainbow Six 3 will only stutter once loaded into the game, making it unplayable. Menus and preplanning work fine, but it has trouble with regular gameplay. I may just need to download the latest patch for it, though. The biggest shocker was Unreal Tournament runs so fast that it’s…slow? I turned on the framerate stats for the game and it was pinging at around 5,000fps and the game ran in slow motion, like it ripped into the space-time continuum. Of course, I don’t think it was registering correctly. Nothing is going to run at 5,000fps. But what the heck is happening?

The only thing that I can determine to be the problem is just the fact that none of these games were expected to run on dual core processors and with graphics cards that were not produced during their time. Even still, I may just need to tweak the settings of my graphics card more to see what helps or hurts.