Spring Break
Boot Camp offers best of PC, Macs
Charles Rumford
Issue date: 8/11/06 Section: Sci-Tech
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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.
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.
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