Thirty seconds or a minute later, the fans should ramp up. With your computer idle, unload the fan control KEXT. You're not going to overheat the CPU by failing to load the drivers. Regarding power management, AFAIK, the worst case scenario would be if the SMC drivers didn't load, in which case after the SMC's watchdog timer fires, the SMC should bring all the fans up to full blast. You apparently do need Apple drivers to use the internal keyboard and trackpad on laptops, though. I run XP though, as I don't need or want the extra features of '7' and the smaller footprint of XP makes it nicer for my needs.

Windows 7 works fine on my mid 2009 17' MBP using the vista drivers.

With the Mac I have OS X for my daily stuff and much of my engineering design work, and occasionally use Windows for the few things I can't do on the mac. There is a lot of scientific packages are just plain don't exist on the Mac. I need windows around to do things like PCB design, because there are no viable Mac alternatives. I do use parallels for light CAD work and such, and I just boot from the BootCamp partition using parallels. Plus the fascist copy protection in the CAD programs makes it difficult to run in parallels. All those really benefit from direct booting into windows. I use BootCamp for playing games (I still play a lot of UT2004) and for doing CAD (Autodesk Inventor and PCB design). Or if MS Windows must be run occasionally, then Bootcamp is an effective way to do so. If one buys a mac, and really can't stand OS X, one can always go back to MS Windows.

I always saw bootcamp as a gimmick to encourage MS Windows users to switch to Apple Hardware.

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