Apple
The hunger for an Apple-Windows dual boot
I must admit that the first thing I thought of when the big Apple-Intel announcement came out was: “Great — now maybe I can have an Intel machine that will dual boot Windows and OS X!” Obviously I’m not alone, since one of the big debates after Macworld has been whether you will be able to run Windows on those new Mac-Intel machines.
Hopes were raised when an Apple spokesman said that Apple wouldn’t do anything to stop someone from loading Windows, but then Betanews said it wouldn’t work because Apple’s machines use the new EFI standard, which replaces the BIOS (the thing that runs before Windows), and Windows doesn’t support EFI. But now it looks like they might, since Intel says it ships a widget that lets older systems run with EFI, so if Apple uses that it would work.
Why the interest in dual-booting Windows and OS X? From my point of view it’s simple. There are things I like doing with Macs — mostly involving images and music — and there are things I like doing with Windows, mostly involving games and things my work forces me to do with Internet Explorer. I’d love to be able to do both. Admittedly, dual-booting is cumbersome (as mentioned here), but I already do it with Linux and it’s not a big deal.
Ideally, there would be an emulator you could run that would allow Windows apps to run on Mac or vice versa. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Update:
A reader mentioned Virtual PC, which I have used but found incredibly slow, even on a fast laptop. It also won’t work on the new Macs, although Microsoft and Apple have said they are committed to making it work.
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busted tees
There is VirtualPC - http://www.apple.com/macosx/applications/virtualpc/
There are others - some inexpensive, some open source. I have a mild itch to test these - the one thing I miss from my Windows laptop is the abilty to play Civ2 - but have not done so yet.
Thanks for the comment Brian.
I tried VirtualPC once on a friend’s high-powered laptop, but it was so slow that it was almost unusable. I’ve tried several open-source emulators such as Wine, Cedega (for games) and Crossover Office for Linux, and they all leave a little to be desired when it comes to ease of use and functionality. I keep hoping that someday emulation will be almost as good as the real thing, but so far it’s not quite there.
Oh you wanted something usable. There is just no pleasing some people (grin).
:-)
The TWIT podcast guys recently suggested that with windows on the box you could run windows apps from within Mac OSX. Hmmm ….
Shiny new look here - cool.
that would be sweet — provided there wasn’t a huge amount of lag, that is.
as for the new look, i was inspired by your redesign :-)
but i couldn’t afford to pay anyone to redo my site, so i picked up a
new wordpress theme and hacked around with it a bit. a change is as
good as a rest, my grandfather used to say
[...] It occurred to me as I read all the other reactions - pro and con - to Apple’s Boot Camp announcement that I hadn’t written here about my reaction to it (assuming anyone really cares), which is a little odd considering that the desire to boot both Apple’s OS X and Windows is something I’ve blogged about before. I guess I was so busy writing about the news for the Globe and Mail’s dead-tree edition (the story is here) that I never got around to blogging it. [...]