Macbook Pro - dual booting

I've got my finger on the trigger about to buy a 15" MBP which will be my first foray into the world of MAC from PC. I still have a pretty rugged desktop (PC) but my Toshiba laptop recently ate it's 2nd hard drive in 3 months and I'm going to "Tosh" it out in the forest behind my house and Office Space it once I get my replacement.

I considered a Dell XPS but they're (for some reason) no longer available in Canada (?) and the shipping dates are whacked. I need a machine well in advance of the 24th of this month.

I'm wondering how many people are dual booting Windows with Bootcamp (and parallel)? All my editing software is 64bit windows and I really don't want to replace it. I also have 2 Win7 Ultimate licenses so why not use them?

I plan to get the 256 SSD so I'm curious about partition sizing and what some of you might suggest? I don't tend to keep my RAW images on the HD very long unless I'm on the road, most everything sits on external storage at home.

Bootcap will work nicely for you, though I would be concerned about hard drive space for a SSD. You might be able to go 50-50 if you plan on staying in windows often.

What kind of editing software do you use?

If you call the publishers, you should be able to convince them to provide you with a license for OS X, so you wouldn't need to pay anything. They might at first tell you know, but if you're persistent about it they should give in. Just be nice about it.

I am not sure what software your using but LR works on both, Nik products work on both, OnOne works on both and photoshop can be transferred from PC to MAC just with the cost of shipping the box which was 7 bucks for me a month ago

I transferred everything to MAC and wish I did it a long time ago

If you are running labor intensive applications, I'd recommend Boot Camp over Parallels. Parallels is great but it takes resources to run. I'd also recommend following tekkies suggestion of switching over to the mac environment if that's where you're going to be most of the time.

GrendelKhan wrote in post #13098639
If you are running labor intensive applications, I'd recommend Boot Camp over Parallels. Parallels is great but it takes resources to run. I'd also recommend following tekkies suggestion of switching over to the mac environment if that's where you're going to be most of the time.

I'd only use Parallels to move things from one side to the other. I know enough about VM's from a professional perspective to know Bootcamp is the way to efficiently run in either OS.

Right now, all my editing is done using 64-bit windows applications. I dont know if I have time to get Apple versions of this stuff before I really need to use it on the 24th but I'll see if I can find another way.

I just got my first mac book 2 weeks back. I picked up the mac book pro 13. dual booting using bootcamp is very simple and easy to setup, and would be better for photo editing versus running in virtual environment. I also decided against SSD due to high prices on the larger size. A more cost effective alternative is to go with the seagate momentus XD hybrid drive (comes in 500gb). It will give you better performance than a standard drive and enough space for dual boot os. I also found good cheap 8gig memory module on amazon. Way cheaper than getting 8gb from apple.