Ok enough of this crap.
Different people choose different tools for different jobs, we all have a preference and that's fine.
The question I'd raised was in relation to bootcamp -which is natively running windows on the hardware with no translation / interpretation / virtualization or emulation layer.
It seems like the answer may well be to try running Win 7 64-bit and DX10 or 11 to see if that improves over the woeful performance of XP-Pro 32-Bit and DX9 -which, incidentally, seems to run CoD equally poorly on 'native windows PC' hardware.
So that's it really then, thanks for all the helpful suggestions and for those of you who've given me a laugh with your, erm, 'interesting' views...
I'll post how whether the change in OS helps out when I've upgraded.
If I may ,humourously, poke a wee bit of fun at our windows colleagues, I have found it slightly bizarre that there seem to be rather more versions of Windows 7 than I was expecting -each with different parts of the OS enabled /disabled for increasingly steep prices. At least with OSX you get the one version (server excluded) and it costs a fraction of the price.
At the risk of starting another flame war, as all I'm likely to be doing is running a couple of applications under win7 is there any merit in buying anything other than the 'Home Premium' (is there a 'Home Basic' or 'Home Starter' ?), obviously x64 ?
Cheers