Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: "Boot Camp Public Beta" (Win OS on the Mac)

This is topic "Boot Camp Public Beta" (Win OS on the Mac) in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=004603

Posted by Jennifer Pan (Member # 2035) on 04-19-2006, 03:11 AM:

Has any of the Mac users out there test driven the Boot Camp software?

Which allows owners of the newest Mac computers to install Microsoft's Windows operating system..

It can be downloaded for free in a test form right now. Boot Camp Software

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-19-2006, 12:32 PM:

As far I can tell, Apple's Boot Camp has received pretty decent reviews. There are other ways one can hack an Intel-based Mac to run Windows. There's even one hack which will allow WindowsXP Media Center Edition to run. Apple's method is by far the most simple.

Boot Camp creates a Windows drivers disc for the Mac's video card, sound card and other stuff for you to use once you install your after market copy of Windows XP SP2. One review I saw suggested Boot Camp would only make a FAT32 partition for WinXP, but other reviews I have read indicate Boot Camp can make a NTFS formatted partition. Definitely go NTFS. FAT32 sucks.

The only drawbacks to Boot Camp is the iSight device on MacBook Pro will not run under Windows and the Front Row remote control won't work either.

Test results on Boot Camp show it runs WindowsXP as fast as any similarly equipped PC box from companies like Dell and Gateway.

The Intel Core Duo CPU is not as fast as a 900 series Pentium D processor, so a Intel MacBook Pro, MacMini or iMac isn't going to blow the doors off a high end desktop machine. When the new line of PowerMacs are released late Summer or in the Fall, they'll be running Intel CPUs as high end as any you can get from Dell, HP, etc. I figure Apple may actually go with XeonDP and XeonMP CPUs for the new PowerMac towers. You can get more cores and more L2 cache in that CPU line than with the PentiumD.

Posted by Adam Wilbert (Member # 1184) on 04-20-2006, 05:17 PM:

sweet. As of right now, ESRI's ArcMap GIS software is the only thing keeping me from going full-on apple at work. If I can run it on a windows-equipped mac I can make the switch completely instead of running two separate machines. [Big Grin]

Posted by Jennifer Pan (Member # 2035) on 04-21-2006, 03:51 AM:

Triple Boot via Boot Camp

quote:
This procedure allows you to triple boot OSX, Windows XP and Linux. It has been sucessfully used to setup a macbook, but is untested on the imac/mini. Therefore if you try this you do so at your own risk.

Posted by Jose Cuadra (Member # 3762) on 04-29-2006, 12:05 AM:

Windows XP works almost perfectly on my friends macbook pro, he can even run games without any problems, and I'm talking about very hardware intensive games such as F.E.A.R.

Now if only they reduced their prices by about 500$, I really dig macs, but I can get a laptop with the same (or better specs) as the most powerful macbook for less than 1800$, they're too overpriced IMO.

Posted by Andrew McCrea (Member # 674) on 04-29-2006, 11:50 PM:

Now, I'm certainly not a computer person (by far), so, forgive me for this question...

Anyway you can run MacOS on a Windows machine?

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-30-2006, 12:01 AM:

It's more difficult to accomplish the hack, but to answer the question, yes. It is possible to hack a "vanilla" Intel PC box and run the Intel version of OSX on it. Some folks were doing just that with OSX not long after the OSX for Intel development kit was released last year.

However, it is a lot easier to manage running both WinXP and OSX natively on an Intel-based Mac.

The big stumbling block for most PCs is the BIOS chip on their motherboards. Intel boards for Macs don't have a BIOS chip. They have Intels "Extensible Firmwire Interface." EFI is called a "bootstrap" by some computer techie types. That's probably where the "bootcamp" name originated.