Installing Windows XP on macbook pro - what happens to your mac afterwards?

Question

Hello,
First time mac user, and I miss windows for it's wide girth of video games, so I am thinking to install windows xp with boot camp assistant.
What happens to your mac afterwards? Does it run as perfectly smooth as before? Does it get slower? Does it develop weird glitches? Will it crash and freeze? If you don't like it, can you restore your computer to how it was before?
And if you download a video game torrent that has a virus even if you scanned it with anti-virus software through windows, and the virus infects your mac, does it only affect the windows partition or does it affect your entire mac?
Thanks,
Purplestar

Answer 1

galacticdog wrote:
Would formatting the partitions differently (where so the windows partition cannot even see the mac partition) prevent drive erasure?
Not really. Under normal circumstances, neither OS X or Windows would let you erase or format the startup drive, but a lot of effort goes into crafting Windows malware to subvert even its most basic protections. If the malware is sufficiently crafty, it could conceivably attack the low level formatting that defines the partition scheme of the drive, bypassing any attempts to hide a partition.
Note that this would be possible with OS X as well, but malware has to get past the defenses of any OS before it can do anything so fundamental. Both OS X & Windows 7 (if not the earlier versions) get high marks for security. It is just that the risk of this happening is greater with Windows because of the sheer volume & diversity of attacks focused on that OS.
That's why it is so important to have effective, up-to-date anti-virus software when running Windows. It isn't so much that any malware could do this today. The concern is that some clever new type of attack could appear & do this, perhaps as a byproduct of trying to take control of the machine & hide code or data where there would normally be no trace of it.
Thanks peeps! I just got a 500 GB harddrive and I'm trying to figure out how best to partition it as a web designer so I can safely use windows.
As you probably know, Boot Camp Assistant is designed to easily handle the necessary formatting chores to set the drive up for dual booting, & there is no reason not to use it. I'm not by any means an expert on Windows & I don't know how much design work you plan on doing on the Windows side, so I can't really suggest appropriate sizes for the two partitions, other than to emphasize the need to leave enough room on the Windows partition for the anti-virus software.
Also, on a related topic, do not forget that you need to back up at least all your user-created files for both OS's, & that this should be done on an entirely separate drive that can physically be disconnected from your Mac for the best insurance against any misfortune, including but not limited to successful malware attacks.