Boot Camp: Notes from the front (and back) line

I've been using Boot Camp now for almost a week, and I apologize to those who have been waiting for my review since my original comment on the release last week.

A few key notes to begin with:

• Installation is very smooth and simple.
• Windows XP on an iMac works very nicely.
• It is unfortunately not without its problems.

Installation is straightforward enough, even if, as on my iMac Intel Core Duo, there isn't a huge amount of free space available. I was easily able to assign the 5GB (which I upped to 10GB) to install Windows XP. Installation is as fast as you would expect, and I didn't experience any problems with the XP SP2 disc I was using as an installation source.

In Use

It's very difficult to find fault in a system running Windows XP when, to all intents and purposes, the iMac basically is a PC under the hood. There's no complex emulation or virtualization technology going on here, you are just using your Intel based, Apple-sourced hardware to run Windows XP.

There are some things which don't work - Bluetooth and the built-in camera are obvious, but also expected, hardware components that don't work.

If you are using a two-button mouse (I use a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 4) then you shouldn't experience any problems, but users of the original one-button mouse may have problems right-clicking.

I managed to install Office, Project and a number of other tools without any issues. I haven't tried any games, although others have had some successes. Throughout the testing, I haven't crashed once, even when loading some complicated Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. Not that I expected any huge problems, but it's nice to see some good stability.

The Disk Issue

One, currently unresolved, issue is that of disk compatibility. You cannot access your Mac OS X disk from Windows and, although Mac OS X will see your NTFS formatted disk and the files on it, you cannot read or write any data to the disk.

You could get round this by using FAT32 instead of NTFS, but doing so would lose the security options built into the NTFS standard that would almost certainly be a requirement within a corporate environment.

This lack of integration has both downsides and upsides.

The major downside is that you cannot exchange files between the two systems without some other type of storage device. For smaller files a USB key would be an obvious choice (although this may be disabled within a corporate environment), a network share is a more likely alternative for that same corporate environment.

The upside is that it doesn't matter what virus or other malware that end up on your Windows XP partition, that will never be able to affect your Mac OS X partition. That's a huge security benefit, and enables OS X to remain a safe harbour in the event of a problem.

Problems and issues

There are a few minor oddities that I've experienced.

First is the issue when you want to reboot or shutdown Windows XP through the Start menu. On my machine, the dialog box for rebooting appears in an odd position on screen, and the mouse is mysteriously frozen, making it impossible to select the option through the mouse.

Also odd is that when you load the Boot Camp boot menu (by holding down the option key), my mouse is also frozen, although this time only in the vertical direction. Now I can move the pointer up and down, but cannot actually select the boot icon and I have to use the keyboard instead.

The default startup disk selection (handled through the Startup Disk option in the System Preferences) seems less than perfect too - a couple of times I've ended up in Windows XP instead of OS X, even though OS X is configured as the default.

One other boot oddity is that because Boot Camp installs a BIOS layer into the EFI boot ROM you can boot into other OS. I was testing Gentoo in Parallels and crashed, and the reboot promptly booted up from the Gentoo CD, which is not quite what I expected. It's good to see that it is possible, and I expect that in future releases of Boot Camp it might even specifically allow you to create multiple partitions and multiple OS, but it would be equally useful to disable booting from CD, or at least have a boot-preference order like most PCs.

Target Market

It is impossible to look at Boot Camp and not think about the potential target market and users. I think there are two main potential users:

• OS X users who must be able to run Windows for some tasks. I frequently need to run Windows only apps (Microsoft Access and Project for starters) and the ability to do this within one machine is great. It wont make a big difference in the office (as I have other machines, and even other laptops), but it will mean that I can take around one laptop on business and client trips, when before I would have needed either to take two laptops, or make a decisions about which one would be most suitable.
• OS X users who are at home and who either need the stability of knowing they can run Windows (for example, for their kids to get Windows experience) or that want to run Windows only software, particularly games. Cost per seat is even more important in a home environment than a home one, and I can see a Boot Camp enabled iMac being a popular addition to many homes as it offers the best of both worlds.

Virtualization (which I'll get on to shortly) is a vital and useful tool in some situations, but there is always a performance hit with virtualization that will affect the performance of some applications.

Corporate foot-in-door?

Will having a Mac that runs Windows give Apple a foot in the corporate door?

I think, large-scale, it is unlikely. Companies will not buy Apple's just to run Windows, and even if they did, the probability is that they would continue to run Windows and never ever use OS X.

OS X has its users across many different businesses and environments, but in many cases the limitations of control and management - particularly across multiple environments - are the barriers to use.

Being able to run Windows properly, without virtualization, will be a key tool for many companies that want to be able to reduce the computer count for those users with two systems, and for those users, mentioned above, who need to run Windows for that specific application or task which is imply unavailable in OS X.

Virtualization killer?

Dual-booting will always be popular. Even in environments where virtualization has been available for years, the ability to switch, wholesale, to another operating system has always been popular and I don't see that going away any time soon.

Any application that requires heavy use of the underlying hardware will suffer within a virtualization environment. Heavy duty disk usage (databases) or graphics (3D, movie editing, games) suffer badly in a virtualized environment, and that's where the benefits of dual-booting come into their own.

I see Boot Camp as the solution for those situations. Boot Camp is not going to negate the need or want for a virtualization solution. I'm after that as much as the next user. But at the moment Boot Camp provides OS X users with a facility they have never had before and it does it in a way that is fast, efficient and doesn't degrade the experience with too many crashes or performance issues.

Still huge?

It is important to remember that however great you think Apple and Mac OS X are, they have for years been seen as the specialized arm of the computing market. For a long time they used different hardware and the ability to run alternative operating systems, of any flavour, was usually limited to another Unix-like environment such as one of the BSDs or Linux.

We may all make fun of Microsoft, and even raise our eyebrows when they announce they are going to support Linux, but Apple have been just as isolated and at times just as anti-alternative operating systems as Microsoft.

The old adage of 'If you can't beat them, join them' applies here - Apple have decided that rather than trying to deny the existence or utility of Windows, they should at least support and allow users to run the OS on their hardware. That's a big step for Apple, and it is an even bigger step for Apple's users because it will help to alleviate some of the problems and issues that have faced Apple users for a long time - how to integrate into a Windows dominated world.

Time will tell whether it was the right decision, but, for the moment, I think Apple have made a wise choice to at least hold hands, if not embrace, an environment which they have been competing with for years. It will certainly simplify aspects of my work, and if it helps me, it will help others.

Helping and improving the experience of their users is what Apple has been about for the last 30 years.

Boot Camp is simply an extension of that principle.