Boot Camp is an easy-enough way to bring Windows 10 to your Mac. But it's not always the best option available, so when forum user misupakanunu asked about using it for their engineering work, I had a pretty good idea of what to recommend.
Misupakanunu writes: I have an HP laptop with following specs: Core i5 5200U, 4GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce 940M, and a MacBook Pro from 2016 a Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB PCIe SSD. I'm an engineering student and I have to work with softwares like SolidWorks, CATIA and ANSYS. As these softwares are not available on mac, what do you guys think i should do ? Should I upgrade my Windows laptop to 16GB of RAM and a 250GB SATA III SSD, as this is all my budget can allow? Or should I Bootcamp a copy of Windows?
Looking into those engineering tools you mention, I see that their requirements vary and can start out very low. I take it that they can become quite intensive, however, so you're wondering if your MacBook Pro is more well-suited, as that machine (likely) sports a 6th Gen Intel CPU, as opposed to the 5th Gen model on your HP laptop.
As someone who has used Boot Camp to get Windows onto a Mac, I have enough experience with this to ask a follow-up that will decide my answer
How much space is free on your MacBook Pro?
If you've got its hard drive even half full, realize that you're going to start to run out of space once you put a Windows 10 installation on that system. And after you install those programs into the machine, I'm pretty sure you're going to be running out of space.
A lack of space will make running Boot Camp (and macOS) a pain. I know, because that is a probIem I ran into while trying to run Cuphead via Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro.
So, unless your MacBook's sporting a sparsely laden hard drive, your best bet is to upgrade your PC. Maybe check first to see if those programs can run on that PC without the upgrade. I'm not sure what HP laptop you have, but I hope it's easy to customize.
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Credit: Laptop Mag
