So I’ve gone through the ropes and partitioned the drive and realized that the copy of XP professional that I had was just an upgrade. After a few tries at installing it I gave up and accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to put XP on it. But this morning I had a bright idea. We have an older copy of Windoze 98, so I hooked up a USB cd drive, plopped the cd in there, and tried to install XP again. It’s working! I wasn’t sure if there would be issues with the setup cd being able to read off of the external drive. I had a few problems with the installer copying files, some of the files wouldn’t copy and then it eventually froze. I did some research and decided to try and use the external cd-rom drive - worked like a charm. Everything is now installed and working perfectly; it’s kind of weird seeing XP with “MacBook” written underneath it.
We’ll be using the new laptop for networking issues, out of town administration of the network - mostly using mac software such as Remote Desktop 3, and even a remote desktop program for the PC. I’ll keep this updated with any problems I run into concerning the MacBook.