Boot Camp

Experience the misery of Windows on fancy hardware, you slimy worms.

It's an idyllic icon, two hard drives, one on top of the other as if one is mounting the other.

Windows is on top. Presumably OS X is underneath. Whatever.

Apple today announced the public beta of a coming feature of 10.5 Leopard called Boot Camp. Equipped with OS X 10.4.6 or better, the 83 MB Boot Camp download, the latest firmware updates, and a copy of Windows XP SP2, owners of MacIntels can now run Windows in a partition separate from their native OS X operating system.

The download turns into a boot CD which is used to set up both OS X and Windows.

The beta will be available only for a limited time.

The release of Boot Camp comes only weeks after enthusiasts succeed in getting XP to run on the new Apple Intel hardware. OS X uses EFI; Windows Vista was to also use it; but that's changed now - Microsoft are still stuck, as Apple put it, 'in the last century'.

Apple are also quick to remind beta testers that running Windows online is far from the carefree experience they might be used to.

Being able to use Windows securely is an attractive option, as is saving on hardware purchases; as Windows more and more slides into neglect, being able to dual boot as Linux users have long done becomes an important advantage. And if any work need be done in Windows, the same OS session need not be used to communicate the results online: the user can reboot in the far safer OS X.

It would seem to be a win all around - all that's lacking now is seeing OS X run on a ramshackle Gateway.