Slashdot Mirror
Intel Macs May Boot Windows XP After All
mister_tim writes "While we'll have to wait till someone actually tries it to get absolute confirmation, news coming from Intel in Australia, reported here by Dan Warne in the Australian Personal Computer magazine, is that the new Intel-based Macs may be able to load and boot Windows XP after all. Several of the early stories after the announcement of the MacBook Pro and the Intel-based iMac assumed that Windows XP would not boot on Intel Macs, since XP doesn't support EFI (replacing BIOS in the new Macs), and Apple's statement that they wouldn't prevent the use of XP on Apple hardware didn't really give people much assurance either way. This statement from Intel implies that there is really no issue."
There are already VMWare images of OSX to run out on BT sites. We played with one at work. I'm sure the people running it on normal PCs will just wait a few days to patch the release version and there won't be any issues. The key is to have the hardware that matches the current drivers. There is an HP notebook running around my office I've seen with OSX on it with full wireless and everything going.
. . . so I can let you know later tonight:). I don't really have any interest in dual-booting per se, but I feel like it's my obligation as a geek.
Got delivered at about 9:00. I only had a half an hour or so to play with it before I drove to work. I'm currently trying to convert my mother, so I set it up at her place so she could play with it today. Thoughts: Just as snappy as the G5's. Much better than my laptop. My only complaint is the mighty mouse - apparently it uses inductance to determine where your finger is, and normally I have my fingers constantly resting on either side. I only played with Safari, Photo Booth, and the MS Word trial, and I opened up system information to make sure it was the right iMac, of course.
And now that I think about it, I guess Word was running on Rosetta. Holy shit! I didn't even notice.
I know that some PPC Linux distros had trouble controlling the fan speed on G5 PowerMacs, causing the fans to run at full-speed continuously. If cooling is maintained by OS X on these machines, would one really want to bother installing Windows on them?
I recently picked up one of these, a Performa 640CD DOS, at a thrift store for $5. It's actually not a terribly bad setup. It's not too unlike the Classic environment is today. There is a Control Panel that lets you start and stop it, with a few other options. Then you can have a keycode to switch between the two full screen. The one I got was a 486DX2/66, but there was a Pentium model available later on. It actually ran pretty decently, and I could see how handy it'd be to be able to run not only the bulk of Mac OS software of the time, but also any DOS/Windows app.
More technically, it was implemented by way of a daughter board plugged into the 68040's CPU socket. On there was the actual 68LC040 (which I swapped for a real 68040) and the 486. There was a separate pair of SIMM sockets for the PC side of things; it had it's own RAM and didn't share the Macintosh's. There were runner ribbon cables that ran the audio over to the Macintosh's audio input plug (shared with, and mutually exclusive with, the Macintosh A/V card), as well as an output for midi/joysticks. All in all it wasn't a bad system, might have been cool if Apple had kept it up longer and perhaps allowed an intermixed interface with a Windows running on the system.