Boot Camp offers best of PC, Macs

By: Charles Rumford

Posted: 8/11/06

In a recent commentary ("Boot Camp offers few incentives for Macintosh users to use Windows," April 14), fellow columnist Mat Boyle wrote about the new Apple program Boot Camp, which enables Intel-based Mac users (those with a MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac or Mac Mini) to run Windows on their machines. At the time of its release, I was not a full-time Mac user due to the fact that I didn't actually own one. Now that I own a Mac, I decided to give Boot Camp a try and run Windows.

I had been contemplating installing Windows on my 3-month-old MacBook Pro after a series of events. During the Governor's School program, I was responsible for administering 60 Windows-based laptops for the students and staff, and used programs that you can only run on Windows. It would have been easier to be able to go back and forth between Mac OS X and Windows XP if they were on the same machine. I did the research and decided that, because Boot Camp was still in beta, it wasn't worth having to reformat and reinstall if things went wrong.

It was a simple installation: you just have to download the package installer and install it on your machine. Now, you do have to make sure that you have all the proper updates, without which you will not be able to run Boot Camp. I made sure that everything was up to date and proceeded to install Boot Camp on my machine.

After only five minutes of actual user interaction before the Boot Camp Assistant took over and re-partitioned my hard drive to include the installation of Microsoft Windows that I was about to install. The five minutes of installation consisted of the following: the standard license agreement, warning you about the fact that this was still in beta; making the Windows Mac drivers CD; and selecting the size of the new Windows partition. Once all of those steps are completed, the Assistant takes over and creates the Windows partition for you.

Before you even think of installing Boot Camp, make sure that you back up any important information from the Mac side of your hard drive. The last thing that you need is to lose all of your information while installing Windows.

Once Boot Camp was installed, it was your standard Windows installation, except for the pushing of the option key on boot to select the Windows boot Key. While in the installer, the only thing that you really have to make sure of is that you don't select your Mac partition when picking the drive to install on. Windows doesn't know which drive to install on, so a lack of attention could result in it formatting your Mac partition. I suggest that you read the sizes and select your install drive based on the size of the drive. Don't forget to double-check.

The actual Windows installation wasn't longer or shorter than any other Windows installation that I have done. Once Windows was up and running, it ran quite smoothly. After the Mac drivers were installed, wow. I swear that Windows ran better on the Mac than on my old PC laptop. There are, however, many features that I had become accustomed to using in Windows on PC, and my brain tried to use them in Windows on Mac. These features include two-fingered scrolling and the built-in speakers being muted when headphones are plugged in.

Since I don't play games or have high-intensity programs to run, it is hard to judge the performance of the machine compare to other ones. But from what little use I have gotten on Windows via Boot Camp, I'm quite pleased with the results. I can now run those programs that will be required when I reach the upper levels of my degree. Microsoft Visio, for example, is a cool program for making diagrams that can only be used in Windows right now. For the moment, however, there aren't really any programs that I need that only work in Windows, so I'm going to get rid of Boot Camp once I figure out how to.

The final version of Boot Camp will come out when the next version of Mac OS X (10.5) is released.

Charles Rumford is a sophomore majoring in information technology and is the production manager. He can be reached at charles@thetriangle.org.