In a move that might one day have us all saying “I remember the day when...”, Apple has released a beta of software to support users wishing to boot their Intel Mac with Windows XP.

Announcing the Boot Camp beta (www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/) Apple indicate the beta software will be a featured part of Leopard, the next version of the Mac operating system. This announcement is a radical move by Apple.

It’s not all perfect at this stage. Sharing files will be complex, as there are slight clashes between the technologies used to format the partitions on a Mac and on a PC (FAT32 volume format or NTFS format).

“Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple’s superior hardware now that we use Intel processors,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We think Boot Camp makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch.”

Boot Camp simplifies Windows installation on an Intel-based Mac by providing a simple graphical step-by-step assistant application to dynamically create a second partition on the hard drive for Windows, to burn a CD with all the necessary Windows drivers, and to install Windows from a Windows XP installation CD. After installation is complete, users can choose to run either Mac OS X or Windows when they restart their computer.

Related links

• http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/
• http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/04/05/bootcamp/index.php
• http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macword/2006/04/bootcamp/index.php

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a guest said: April 05, 2006   Votes: +0

	Macworld explain the Boot Camp process http://www.macworld.com/2006/0.../index.php
	report abuse vote down vote up

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