speed in osx

I have a 160 gb hdd w/1 gig ram running XP and I'm looking to dual boot osx on my aao. What kind of performance can I expect? I did search the forum and wasn't able to find a specific answer. I only ask because I'm going to purchase osx and don't want to waste my money if the performance isn't good. Also just real quick, will I have to wipe my hard drive of xp before I attempt the dual boot. Thanks in advance.

 

good

 

Maybe out of date, but perhaps this response will help others with a similar question.

My AAO 150 has a 120 GB hard drive (SATA drive), with Win XP Home pre-installed. It also has that little 5 GB partition for the recovery software.

Before doing anything to my AAO, I used something called Spotmau Powersuite (booted in advance mode from USB CD-ROM) to divide the Win XP partition. The Powersuite includes a program called Partition Genius, and I simply cut as much off of my Win XP partition as possible. I ended up with about 60 GB as the Win XP partition, and 50 GB for the Mac partition.

Win XP remains stable and very happy, just as if I never did anything to it.

The new partition is where I installed iATKOS 4i, following directions by SbM. Don't forget his initial notes about formatting the drive (partition in this case). The AAO will load the Darwin bootloader and automatically go into OS X, so you don't worry about anything for the installation. In fact, when you are done with the initial install, you can unplug the USB external drive/CD/DVD drive..

After installing, tweaking, etc. as required, you can go back to the Win XP operating system by interrupting the Darwin bootloader within the timeframe required. If you do this, you easily load into Win XP.

So now, your original question of is it worth it? Value is relative to the owner, but I definitely think it's worth it. This little AAO is very speedy with OS X. The few problems, as outlined nicely by Rory in his closed post, are outweighed by the implementation and utility on the AAO.

 

Thank you for your input.

 

The speed on this machine running Leopard 10.5.4 is awesome and even faster than my powerbook g4 (especially for video). I did upgrade the ram to 1.5 gb and it does make a small but noticeable difference.

For those people that are new to OSX, just be sure to let your AONE run uninterrupted for about 30 minutes or so after tweaking and installing so that spotlight can index the contents of your drive. You'll notice that the processor usage is a bit higher during this initial install period but will drop after mdsworker is finished doing its thing. You can check app processor usage by going to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor and looking at the process usage there.