You ’ll forgive me if I seem a little confused these days . Despite the fact that I exercise in a laboratory full of Macs , I spend more of my time recently staring at Windows XP than at Mac OS X.
It ’s not that I ’m mulling over a platform switch — rather , this XP overload is part of Macworld Lab ’s efforts to see how Microsoft ’s operating system do on Apple ironware now that package exists that enable you to boot into XP on an Intel - based Mac . With the supporter from our babe publishing , PC World , we ’ve been draw theWorldBench 5 existent - Good Book bench mark suiteon all of our Intel organization to estimate cross - platform performance .
Our examination efforts set out shortly after hackers came up with a way to get Intel - based Macs to move Windows XP . The hacked method takes a mint of feat install and configure — and just as much endeavour to run benchmark tests , as it deform out . WorldBench mechanically restarts the computer many , many times during the testing process , pressure us to manually select which OS — XP or OS X — to boot into after each restart .
That ’s why we greeted last hebdomad ’s arriver of Boot Camp with a commixture of alleviation and sadness . originate by Apple to let Intel - based Macs flow Windows XP , Boot Camp allows you to set Windows as the nonremittal startup organization ; that mean we no longer had to babysit the auto during examination . At the same sentence , we were also a little peeved about how many hour and daytime we had neutralise benchmarking the hack on method .
Even with Boot Camp , it still takes a couple of hours to fructify these systems up . But once running , they ’ve been very static . Here are some WorldBench 5 results , compared to three computing machine recently tested by PC World .
Windows XP Testing
Best results inbold . All individual examination results in seconds .
All systems had 1 GB RAM . Macs used Apple ’s Boot Camp beta to set up Windows . All machine were tested with Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 except the HP Pavilion which had Windows Media Center Edition installed . For more selective information on WorldBench 5 , gohere.—Macworld Lab examination by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
As you may see , the Macs endure Windows gave these PCs a political campaign for their money , with the 2.16GHz MacBook Pro change by reversal in the firm scores on three of the five private tryout . The build - to - order MacBook configuration also tied the 2.16GHz HP Compaq in the 6th mental testing , involving Roxio VideoWave .
Noticeably absentminded from the mesa is the Mac mini Core Duo which had bother completing the test suite ( the multitasking test in particular ) . Also , one of the 12 applications in the WorldBench 5 suite—3D Studio Max — won’t run on a Boot Camp system ; as luck would have it , you may still get valid WorldBench score without the two tests which use that app . The problem is n’t a matter of horsepower , but one of transcript protection . Hopefully , that issue will resolved soon .
We ’ll keep trying to get the Mac mini to be given WorldBench , and we ’ll account those scores when we do . We ’ve also started turn tail the tests on our Intel Macs running Windows via Parallel ’s raw virtualization software . So match back shortly for more resultant .