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Have your Mac and PC it, too

To quite a few, it was a shock and even to others a betrayal when on June 6, 2005 Apple Computer announced that they would be switching from the IBM PowerPC microprocessor that they had been using for their computers since 1994, to an Intel processor.

It wasn’t a betrayal because they were switching processors, from 1984 with the first MacIntosh to 1994 they used the Motorola 68K family of processors, it was because they would start using a chip also used my their arch-enmity, Microsoft Windows, the Intel chip.

By the beginning of 2006 the first computer from Apple with the Intel chip was released. Soon afterwards a group, hackers for lack of a better word, started trying to run Windows on the Intel based Apple computer. They succeeded but their efforts were pretty much mute, since on April 5, 2006 Apple made public a piece of software called Boot Camp. This software creates a dual boot solution that allows Windows XP service pack 2 to run. Boot Camp includes Windows drivers and will be made a part of the next edition of OS X, code named leopard.

In short, Boot Camp does the work to develop a Windows partition on the Intel based Mac’s hard drive. Then all you need to do is install Windows onto it. You will need a new copy of Windows XP sp2 and not one that has been installed onto a PC or an upgrade release. Once installed with a certain key sequence pressed at startup, a window appears giving a choice of either run OS X or Windows.

The Windows system can’t read the Mac partition. But depending on how the Windows partition is formatted, it can be read and written to while running OS X.

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