Boot Camp, Parallel, brings XP to the Intel Macs
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d know by now that Apple released their Boot Camp application which allows you to run Windows XP SP2 on your Intel-based Mac Book Pro, Mini, or iMac. I put off buying an Intel-based Mac for a while, mainly because I don’t really need one right now. However, I did recently buy a Dell laptop since I needed it for gaming away from my computer room, and other mobile uses. Now, I’ll be selling both my Dell and Powerbook.
When I first saw the news, I thought it was a leftover April Fool’s joke. You know how they linger around for a few days. However, the date was April 5, not March 31 or April 1, so I immediately downloaded it and tested it on my Intel iMac at work. Before you could run Boot Camp, you have to install the 10.4.6 update and a firmware update. The firmware update is what actually allows you to boot your Windows XP SP2 CD, not Boot Camp itself. Boot Camp is an application that helps you get started by paritioning your hard drive. Wait…why wasn’t that included in the OS YEARS AGO? It also asks if you want to burn a CD of drivers for the hardware that’s on your Mac.
So I installed the firmware, rebooted, and partitioned my hard drive to give XP 10 GB of free space (I’ll explain why further down). I happened to have a slipstreamed XP SP2 CD on me which is required for this to work. If you don’t have a Windows XP CD that’s been slipstreamed to install with SP2, please check out Paul Thurrot’s site on SP2 slipstreaming.
XP installed without a hitch, and fast too. During the installation, it asked me to hook up to my corporate network. Since the drivers for the network card have to be installed later, I had to stick with the WORKGROUP Workgroup for now.
After installation, I immediately installed the Macintosh Hardware Drivers. This gave me video acceleration for the ATI X1600, network card drivers, Airport drivers, and Bluetooth. What it DIDN’T give me were drivers for the built-in iSight video camera. When I tried using the iSight, XP bluescreened on me and the iMac rebooted. Apparently, using the iSight is a bad idea.
After I got the network drivers working, I connected to my corporate network. Ctrl-Alt-Delete is required for getting on a corporate network, and the iMac’s “Del” key on the middle keypad worked perfectly. The “Delete” key on the main part of the keyboard is really backspace and doesn’t work for the three-finger-salute. Also, the Mighty Mouse that comes with the iMac works as a two-button mouse with a scroll wheel just fine.
That was it, I finally had Windows XP running natively on a Mac. No emulation, no virtual machine, native.
I knew that running Visual Studio and Office would work, so I had to run something that would push the system a little harder. On my PC, I installed World of Warcraft. I shared a folder on the Mac-running-XP and copied the WoW folder from my PC to it. I put the WoW folder in “Program Files” and ran it. It worked, video acceleration and all. My character was in Ironforge, one of the busiest, laggiest zones in the game. Video was choppy near the mailbox, and the slowest I got was 17 frames per second. The fastest, away from the mailbox, was 51 frames per second. This was, in no way, a scientific way of determining how well the iMac ran Windows, but it does show that the frames per second were on-par with what you’d expect from a PC of with comparable specs.
That was what pushed me over the edge – I now only needed one laptop for my mobile gaming on XP and development on Mac OS X. On the way home I stopped at my local CompUSA (Apple stores are further and traffic is a pain at 5pm) and got a 2 GHz dual-core Mac Book Pro. I ran through the steps above (firmware, 10.4.6, partitioning, drivers) and installed XP.
Right off the bat, I have to say that XP really looks foreign on a MBP. Those awful colors and crappy icons are such a contrast to the elegance of the MBP and Mac OS X. It’s now that you really see how pathetic XP looks vs. Mac OS X. Sure, you need XP for gaming. Sure, you use XP because its popular, but when you see the beauty of Mac OS X you wonder why people use XP at all.
Problems arose when I tried right-clicking on my MBP’s trackpad. There’s no right-click on the trackpad since Apple still believes in the one-button approach. On Apple’s Boot Camp discussion board, I found a small app called applemouse that allows you to use the control key to toggle a right-click. If you want, using a standard USB three-button mouse without applemouse works fine also.
The bigger problem was that the MBP has no delete key for Ctrl-Alt-Del. There’s a “Delete” key, but like on the iMac, it’s mapped to “Backspace”. Again, on this thread on Apple discussion boards, I found a reference to the Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit Tools. It’s a suite of command-line apps that help with Win2K Server, but also work on Windows XP. The remapkey.exe tool allows you to map a key on your keyboard to one that’s not physically there. I mapped F12 as my Delete key since I hardly ever use F12 on Windows. Once it’s set, it writes changes to the registry and asks you to reboot (you should). The only time you’ll ever have to run remapkey.exe again is if you want to map a different key to “Delete”, or undo the changes.
So that was it, I was up and running. WoW worked, keys mapped, everything was fine. A friend of mine pointed out that when he tried to use the latest version of AIM, it would bluescreen his MBP and reboot it. Now, AIM shouldn’t crash anything. My first thought was that it had to be the camera and sure enough it was. What I did was disable the camera and AIM worked perfectly. You disable the camera by going into the “System” control panel, either using the Control Panel folder, or right clicking on “My Computer” and selecting “Properties”. Once there, select the “Hardware” tab and click on the “Device Manager” button. You’ll see a list of devices. There will be one called “Imaging Devices”. Click on the ‘+’ next to the title to show the list of devices. In there you’ll see “USB Camera”. Right click on it and select “Disable”. You’ll get a warning that this device will no longer work. Click “OK” and your camera will now have a red X over it. You can now use the AIM client.
Personally, I see this as a win-win for Apple and Microsoft. For users, it gives those of us that understand how it works a way to use both Mac and Windows on the same machine. The losers in this are the PC manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Gateway since they can’t license Mac OS X for their machines, so if you’ve been on the fence about what kind of computer to get, there’s no reason to NOT get a Mac.
Then, just this morning, Parallel released their virtual workstation. This allows you to run a PC in a window while running OS X at the same time. The upsides are that you don’t have to reboot, and you’re not forced to use Windows XP SP2 since you can run Windows 3.11, OS/2, Linux, NT, XP SP2, etc. The downside is that you don’t get video acceleration and currently, no sound. It’s a great solution for people that might need to work on web pages, or do some light development.
I also tested it this morning. I found that I had to quit the app and restart it for it to recognize my iMac’s CD/DVD drive, and it hung on rebooting.
Again, this is a win for Apple, even though they didn’t release the virtual solution. Mac OS X is an excellent OS, and now people can finally buy Macs and see how well Mac OS X is while still using Windows.
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