Okay, You Proved That It Worked, Now Remove It


I took the leap yesterday and installed Boot Camp on my Intel Core Duo Mac Mini.
Installation was very straightforward: I had to upgrade the firmware on the Mini to the latest version, and then I ran the Boot Camp installer. It walked me through partitioning the hard drive and creating a CD with device drivers on it, and then it went through the Windows XP installation process. An hour after I started the process, I had an XP environment running on Apple hardware. The video, audio, network, bluetooth, and wireless were all configured perfectly.
One annoyance I’ve found is that the clock in the XP environment is always wrong when I boot up. This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s disconcerting to see “3:00” in the corner when it’s 10:00. It’s also a pain to have to reset it each time I use it.
Basic web surfing and accessing other computers on my network all work fine.
My next step is to install some intense applications (I’m thinking of loading Adobe Audition, which we use to record the Cheap Date Podcast)– I want to try to slam the computer’s CPU and see how those Dual Cores deal with it.
So what does all this prove? Well, that you can run Windows XP on an Apple computer.
From the bigger picture, I’m not sure what it means. I’m beginning to see what some in the Mac community are saying, that this could be a big misstep for Apple. My guess is that this is a novelty that’s going to wear off. I just hope Apple has some sort of strategy for bridging the worlds– I’m thinking that stable virtualization would be the best selling point.
Meanwhile, my coworkers and my beloved are pressuring me to de-contaminate my Mini as quickly as possible. We’ll see. 🙂

jtl