I am running Snow Leopard on my iMac and have partitioned my hard drive to run Windows XP. If I upgrade to Yosemite, will I still be able to run XP?

Question

I am running Snow Leopard on my iMac and have partitioned my hard drive to run Windows XP. If I upgrade to Yosemite, will I still be able to run XP?

Answer 1

bobfromnorth battleford wrote:
...Now what happens if I upgrade to Yosemite on either my iMac or my MBPro?
If I install VM Fusion or Parallels, does Windows run all the time? How does that affect computer performance? and how much do I need to worry about hard drive corruption?
Current versions of Fusion and Parallels are compatible with Yosemite. Both are applications which you only run when you want to run Windows within them. As such, there's no effect on computer performance when they're not in use. Like any other software, there is some additional load on your Mac when both Windows and the Mac OS are running together, but any noticeable effect depends on what each is being expected to do and what resources (e.g. available RAM and the number of CPU cores) you can devote to each.
I think there's less chance of HD corruption with a VM than there is with running Windows natively on the Mac in Boot Camp. Consider that, with a VM, you can create Snapshots of the state of your VM at a given time, and then, if something goes wrong (virus, malware, software installations), you can simply restore the Snapshot in a matter of seconds and eliminate the problems in the process. Moreover you can make a backup copy of the entire VM file, and replace a later version if you wish. Also consider that you can assign, say, 100GB of HD space to the VM, but the actual space devoted to the VM is only what's actually used; as more is needed, more is made available and Windows can't tell the difference. So, for example, my Win 7 Pro VM has an 80 GB virtual HD but only takes up 45 GB on my SSD, and that's with XP Mode in VPC installed inside it.
Microsoft no longer supports XP, though virus signature updates are still being issued. But MS has installed a pop-up message about EOL that won't go away (it's installed with KB2934207). Even if you remove that KB in Add and Remove Software, the pop-up continues. But if you have a Snapshot or a backup which is prior to it's original installation, you can skip installing KB2934207, and suppress it's reappearance on a Software Update list.