Windows On MacTel Update

[Hirich]

If you're interested in this, there seems to be a major development. The competition to make Windows boot was won a couple of weeks ago, and I read a test drive report which indicated that it sort of worked (a nightmare to install, but basically worked well, excepting a few hardware incompatibilities; much, much faster than emulation)

Now Apple themselves seem to have upped the ante by releasing a beta of BootCamp themselves:
www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

In summary:
- Will be included in Leopard
- Provides an Either/Or option at startup, rather than emulation within OSX
- Includes drivers for the Apple-specific hardware (graphics card was the big problem with the open source version)
- Does not appear to you to backup and initialise your hard drive, then reinstall OSX
- Though not clear, I presume it does allow you to access documents from either OS (e.g. create a Word document in OSX, then restart and edit it in XP)

Despite a couple of digs at Windows on the page, this doesn't appear to be a late April Fools joke. If you've got an Intel machine and a spare Windows CD, and are braver than me, it might be worth a punt.

[robbieduncan]

You do not need to resinstall OSX: it can dynamically resize the OSX partition. Passing files between the OSs is dependant on the drive formats. By default XP will not see the OSX partition. Third party software is available to allow XP to read/write HFS+. If you format the XP partition with FAT32 OSX will be able to read/write it, NTFS will be read only to OSX.

[xiphias]

I'll have a go at this, if my mac ever turns up! (Tomorrow they say...) How big a partition should I be looking at for os x and programs - 20gb?

[robbieduncan]

xiphias said:

I'll have a go at this, if my mac ever turns up! (Tomorrow they say...) How big a partition should I be looking at for os x and programs - 20gb?

I'm currently using 80Gb on mine! If you are buying a Mac I'd say allocate most of the disk for OSX, but that's me...

[xiphias]

80?! I'm using about 20 for xp and all programs right now, hence the suggestion. I'm guessing similar for os x, based on how much of this is junk right now. Music, vids and personal docs are not included in that 20gb figure. You still reckon more than 20?

[Bodo]

I use 10GB for Linux and programs. That includes desktop, office, DTP & graphics apps, Maya and Pro/Engineer, and the /tmp directory. 20GB must be more than sufficient!

[page3]

Why Dual Boot when you have run in parallel

www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/



(Not that I have any use for MS Windows in my house so won't be running it myself)

[xiphias]

Right..plans gone slightly awol today. Got my mini today with 100gig drive, formatted to 93 (seems quite high loss there). However, before I put anything on it os x was already taking up 16 gigs! Surely that's not reasonable..

[pjskel]

100 GB is decimal (easier to comprehend) whereas the drive is actually 100/1.024 GB = 97.65 GB.
Allowing for overheads and formatting, 93 odd is par for the course.

16 GB for OS X is right - there's the OS, plus a whole load of various Applications inc. MS Office Test Drive, and more associated with iLife. Also the Likes of Pages and Keynote (the constituent parts of iWork) as trialers.
All adds up.

>> Edited by pjskel on Monday 10th April 23:20

[Hirich]

A useful report on living with Mac & Windows here, particularly how to get the two systems working well together (e.g. where's the right button? Accessing documents from the other partition):
www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2