Yesterday was a milestone day for the Mac . A pair of enterprising cyber-terrorist got Windows XP to boot on an Intel - base Mac , andwon almost $ 14,000for their worry .
We atMacworldsacrificed one of our iMacs and joined forces withPC Worldto see this first - hand . And indeed , thanks to the hard work ofPC World’sDanny Allen , we’ve fuck off a working Windows iMac .
Let me be the first to say how creepy a phenomenon this is .
Anyway , now that the first attempts to get this workings have succeeding , thecommunity is buzzing . Because money was at stake before , many originative hacker were keeping their adept ideas to themselves . Now that the check ’s been write , it appears that everyone is joining together to figure out how to head for the hills Windows XP as expeditiously as possible on Apple ’s ironware .
As I indite this , it ’s still rasping going . Our iMac work , even bear out Ethernet and Wi - Fi , but internal audio is disabled and without a native video number one wood , run window around on screen is distressingly dull . ( As a Mac substance abuser who has taken pride in how Everything Just go , I have to hold I ’m smile a little mo as I watch people fight with get hold just the veracious drivers to get Windows XP to work properly on the iMac . ) And users of MacBook Pros and Intel - free-base Mac miniskirt are reporting other driver - come to complications .
Still , I think that within a few weeks , many of these issues will be ironed out , and there will be a comparatively simple step - by - step procedure to get your Intel - based Mac to dual - kicking into both Mac OS X and Windows XP . ( in person , I ’d rather have something like Virtual PC or VMware that lets me run Windows within Mac OS X , but that ’ll fall finally . )
If you ’re wondering how this unexampled system works , there ’s a massive amount of detail float around the connection . But the short , less technical translation is this : there ’s some ingenious software that makes EFI , the Intel iMac ’s equivalent of a PC ’s BIOS , act like BIOS . Once that ’s installed , you may boot off of a modified Windows XP installation standard candle - read-only memory and install Windows as normal . ( You ’ll need to wipe your hard driving and make two partitions , one for Mac and one for Windows , first . )
Once the installation is done , the duple - boot Mac behaves just like a Mac when in OS X mode . But when you restart the system of rules , OS X does n’t automatically reboot . Instead , a colored Apple logo come along on the Mac ’s gray boot - up screen . Pressing the up- and down - pointer Florida key toggles between that logo and a colorful Windows XP logotype . Once you ’ve opt which operating organization to boot into , press rejoinder : you ’ll either see the dark - gray silhouetted Apple logotype , or an tantamount dark - gray silhouette Windows logotype . And then a normal the boot cycle will start .
Mac drug user are Mac users because they love the Mac . But some of us , from time to meter , need to run Windows — usually for a little collection of program that are n’t Mac compatible . For anyone who has the indigence to boot into Windows from time to time , this is with child news — because it intend that we can blockade buy PCs altogether , and just keep an supererogatory sectionalization ready to hand on our Macs .
