all my 32 bit apps installed fine under Vista 64 and Win7 64 with no issues.

which programs were you having problems with?

 

XP says it can address 4gigs but in reality it can only address 3gig, and treats the left over gig as a second "page" of ram. Normally it uses that last gig as swap space, but it cant use it for the stack. Its a flaw that followed windows from the 2000 days, and is fixed in vista and 7


On the software side, I have not had any problems with older software under X64, I have found I had to drop a few very old stuff (old dos based) into win98 emulation mode but vista and 7 make that so simple.

 

I got lucky recently and had a friend that wanted to trade his new MacBook for my fairly new HP business grade laptop. Installed Mac OSX 10.5.6, then installed Windows 7 beta 7000 build. No sound at first, but just needed different Realtek drivers (vista ones). Everything has worked normally so far except my Symantec Corp 10.2 or Endpoint 11.0 gives a compatibility error at startup, so I ripped it out.

This beta runs so much cleaner than when Vista released its beta...omg.

 

Oh...btw. I wanted to Dual or triple boot my windows partition to do Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Or, XP, Ubuntu, and Windows 7. Anyone know if this is possible on a Mac? Havent had to time to research it, yet.

 

i'd guess that, at some point, you'll run into partitioning limitations. but, i'm uncertain if thats just a throwback to the 4 primary partitions limitation of yester year, or if that still holds current...

i know that windows only uses 1 by default, ubuntu only needs 2 partitions ( / and swap), and i believe it is dependent on which file system type you use in OSX (HFS or Unix style) as per how many partitions OSX will require.

 

Yup the 4 partition limit has been removed. There is a good description on OpenSuSE's www if you search for MacBook installations.

IIRC, you can boot into any of the first four partitions, but you can have further partitions on the drive. For example, on my system, partition 1 is reserved for boot/partition info, partition 2 is OS-x, partition 3 is Linux, partition 4 is Windows 7 and partition 5 is the Linux swap area.

 

Some of the problems with 32bit/64bit compatibility can vary, the problems I've run into are small things, like anti-virus or some type of web based program that's secondary to another primary program, e.g. Adobe Flash within FireFox.

 

It is possible - though you'll have to research partition managers and mess around a bit. If you are into Linux, it is pretty straightforward. Look up reFit - it is a really useful boot tool.

My MacBook is triple booting between OS-X, Linux and Win-7.

 

i do understand that you can have logical partitions, but i was referring to the 4 primary partition limitation.

quite a while back, when i was toying with ManDrake 7.1, i would create something like 5 or 6 partitions ( /, root, var, tmp, usr and swap). even in that scenario, there was only 1 primary partition.

so, i might have not been clear with my description previously...

 

I tried a couple of apps which didn't work:

MS Flight Sim 2004 (I think). It didn't work, but flight sims are notoriously fickle with their environment so it could be more related to hardware than OS.

OBD tools for the WRX diagnostics. Given that this package is USB and uses an html style interface, I'm surprised that it didn't work. It looked like it was very generic code.

I'd really like to get the OBD tools working so I'll check into this some more.

 

I think my description was equally bad. Quote from the OpenSuSE page:

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_on_a_Mac

"There is a myth that you can only have 4 partitions on an Intel Mac, this is not true. The limitation is that Windows and GRUB only know how to read the MBR and not the GPT and are thus limited to the first four primary partitions. Both the OS X and Linux kernels know how to read the GPT and so are not restricted.

All that is thus needed is to ensure that:

* The first partition (/dev/sda1) is kept for the EFI boot partition, do not delete or format.
* The second partition (/dev/sda2) is kept for OS X, do not delete or format.
* The third partition (/dev/sda3) is kept for GRUB, so use for either / or /boot
* The fourth partition (/dev/sda4) is kept for Windows
* The fifth and subsequent partitions are used for Linux as required, e.g. /, /home, /tmp, swap, etc. "