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Review
Boot Camp
Issue: 5.3 (March/April 2007)
Author: Toby Rush
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,011
Starting Page Number: 8
RBD Number: 5302
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.apple.com/
Known Limitations: None
Full text of article...
June 6, 2005, is a day that most Mac developers will remember: on that date, Apple announced that it would begin using Intel processors in all of its computers. Now that the switch is complete, it appears for the most part to have been a change for the better, and it has provided a few benefits that would not have been possible with PowerPC chips.
One notable new benefit is something that developers started working on within days of the first Intel development machines becoming available: the prospect of running Microsoft Windows, an operating system designed for Intel processors, on Apple hardware. Developers tried furiously to make it work for months, even provoking a contest with a considerable cash prize for the first one to do it. But then Apple surprised everyone once again by releasing Boot Camp, the company's officially-sanctioned method for running Windows on a Mac.
Boot Camp is available now as a free public beta release, and Apple has since announced that it would be a feature of Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X. (Apple has also announced that when Leopard is released, Boot Camp will be available to Tiger users for $30.) To use it, you must have an Intel-based Macintosh, 10 MB of free disk space, and a copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 2.
Boot Camp does three important things to allow you to run Windows on your Intel Mac: it burns a CD containing necessary Windows drivers for your Mac, it repartitions your hard drive to create a Windows partition, and it reboots your computer from the Windows XP CD so you can install Windows.
The drivers CD is completely automated and requires only that you insert a blank CD. The repartitioning process works much like any other partitioning tool with one wonderful exception: Boot Camp will repartition your drive without affecting any of the data already on the drive. Once this process is complete (and it finishes rather quickly), Boot Camp asks you to insert the Windows XP installation CD, and reboots your machine into Windows.
Once the installation is complete and you've installed the drivers from the drivers CD you created, you have a fully functional Windows machine at your disposal, and booting back and forth is easy: You can either use the Startup Disk control panel (which is installed in your Windows system by the drivers CD) or, easier yet, hold down the option key during startup. There is no speed penalty for running on Apple hardware; the system is amazingly responsive in every regard. The Boot Camp drivers even provide support for nearly anything you might have on your machine, including built-in iSight cameras and software-based screen brightness controls.
The only drawback one can bring up with Boot Camp is that fact that switching between operating systems requires a reboot; there is no capability to run Mac OS and Windows simultaneously, as is the case with Parallels and the now-outdated VirtualPC.
If you are doing a lot of cross-platform work in REALbasic, or even if you just have the occasional need to run a Windows-only application, Boot Camp is a dream come true.
IN BRIEF Product Boot Camp 1.1.2 (Beta) Manufacturer Apple, Inc. Price Free (Beta) Contact Info http://www.apple.com/ Pros Allows Windows to run on a Mac Extremely easy installation
Cons Requires reboot to switch between systems Rating (1.0-5.0): 4.7
End of article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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