“A long-held dream of experienced computer users and IT departments was finally fulfilled last week by Apple Computer Inc. with the beta release of its Boot Camp software. Apple has given Windows and Mac users the first realistic way to run both OS X Tiger and Windows XP on a Macintosh computer. Although other products, including Microsoft’s $130 Virtual PC for Mac, have employed different means to accomplish the deed, in real-world use they’ve been less than satisfactory,” Scot Finnie writes for Computerworld.
“Apple has dramatically improved on the Windows-on-a-Mac experience over emulation-based solutions. After completing Boot Camp, Windows XP runs extremely fast on the Mac with very few quirks or issues — so fast and well, in fact, that the notion of having your cake and eating it too comes to mind. That decades-old fork in the road between being forced to choose either the Mac for its superior design or Windows for its wealth of available software has disappeared. With a recent-model Mac, a large hard-drive — and for the cost of a full-install version of Windows XP — you can have both operating systems on the same computer — the best of both worlds,” Finnie writes.
“The first thing you’ll notice about running Windows XP on an Intel-based Macintosh is how very fast it is. This is the way Windows XP was meant to perform. It may not sound like a good thing to some people, but after only a few minutes of working with Boot Camp-installed XP, you may entirely forget that you’re using a Mac. Windows XP works exactly like it should when Boot Camp installs it,” Finnie writes. “Apple has done a great job with drivers it has supplied for the video, audio, wireless networking, Ethernet, Bluetooth, the eject button,and others. The mission critical hardware works well under XP. Although this is beta software, Apple hasn’t publicly committed to further hardware support, and was cagey on this point when I asked about it in an interview. In case it’s not clear: Windows users would like more hardware driver support from Apple with Boot Camp. A MacBook Pro TrackPad driver is required, and the ability to use the wireless input devices, iSight, motion sensor and so forth is highly desirable.”
“Apple has also done good work on the process of initiating a switch between the two operating systems… By comparison, the Windows way of managing multiple-boot options is inelegant. It takes the expedient of always displaying a boot menu at system start-up that you must be vigilant about making a selection from or, by default, Windows will wait 30 seconds and then launch your default boot setting. Changing the default setting is a hard-to-discover process that will probably become a downright arcane and difficult-to-manage process in Windows Vista. Apple’s solution is far better,” Finnie writes. “What’s Apple’s next step? The company certainly has my attention.”
Much more in the full article here.
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@ OSX and XP user: “XP is certainly much faster than OS X when it comes to:
– installing malware and utterly f’ing the system.
– encountering an error that results in a crash”
FUD
———–
MCCFR: Two words: Mac Mini.
Mac Min For businesses and schools? Nah. Too easy to steal. Plus Have to buy a (Dell) monitor, plus keyboard, mouse…
——–
Artist:
“We have an IT guy who comes to our Real Estate office a couple times a month to clean up the Dells because they’re so full of malware, and the pop ups are unbearable.”
Tip: Install Firefox, don´t use Internet Explorer on a PC. Once you do that you won´t get any adware or malware.
Oh yeah- and quit going to the sleazy porn sites and warez-type scum sites.
Mnemonic – yeah… I miss ole sputnik….
he disappeared about the same time MacDude did…. and then Morty showed up.
you don’t think?
That´s what we have always commented about Windows XP – how fast it is compared to OSX.
—-
That’s because OS X is defragging on the fly…
From article: “The first thing you’ll notice about running Windows XP on an Intel-based Macintosh is how very fast it is.”
´Cause everyone here claims XP runs soooooooooooooo slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww…………..
@ OSX & XP User
“Tip: Install Firefox, don´t use Internet Explorer on a PC. Once you do that you won´t get any adware or malware.
Oh yeah- and quit going to the sleazy porn sites and warez-type scum sites.”
At work we use Firefox, nothing else, especially not IE, but we’re still overloadedwith spyware and adware.
Tip to you my short sighted friend: Get A Mac! You can do what you want when you want.
JIm: “At work we use Firefox, nothing else, especially not IE, but we’re still overloadedwith spyware and adware.”
So why don´t we get spyware and adware on any of the 5 Windows XP computers we have networked and hooked up to broadband internet service and in use about 12 hours per day?
You guys have a firewall set up on your internet connection? Sometimes I wonder about the brainpower of tech help people.
Oh, and we do what we want when we want with OSX and XP.
” Tip: Install Firefox, don´t use Internet Explorer on a PC. Once you do that you won´t get any adware or malware.
Oh yeah- and quit going to the sleazy porn sites and warez-type scum sites.”
I did download firefox, but he deleted it, and he’s set the computers up so that anything you try and download neeed his permission to open.
Also, the MLXchange for realtors only supports IE. Version 7
–quit going to the sleazy porn sites and warez-type scum sites.–
In the words of Chief Wiggum’s kid, Ralph – THAT’S UNPOSSIBLE!