My weekend with Boot Camp and Windows

So I've got a friend who just purchased a shiny, new MacBook. It's packed with RAM and beautiful (she went with the cla ic white). She's a long time Mac user, and has been ha y with her G3 iBook since she bought it. Recently, however, she had been charged with using some proprietary Windows-only software for work (sound familiar, anyone?). So, enchanted by Boot Camp and the Windows-friendly Intel Macs, she made the big purchase...and convinced me to get everything off the ground for her. I accepted the challenge, as I had never played with a Macbook or i talled Windows on any machine. Even though this story has a ha y ending (the aforementioned Macbook is currently a dual-boot machine), getting from Point A to Point B wa 't easy.

First the good news. Boot Camp i talled without a hitch. If you haven't done this before, I can tell you it's pretty straight forward. At one point, you're asked to burn a CD of Macintosh- ecific Windows drivers, which I did. When the i tallation of Boot Camp was complete, you're asked to put your Windows i taller CD (XP with Service Pack 2 on a single disc) into the machine and click the "I tall Windows" button. It's very creepy, and the machine then reboots and starts the next i tallation, this time Windows XP. Or, at least, that's what the i tructio say (Note: PRINT OUT the i tructio that are bundled with the Boot Camp i taller. Trust me).

I got the initial blue screen and watched as the i taller "checked" a number of files. Eventually it hung up and froze. After staring at it for ten minutes, I turned to my printed i tructio . "If i tallation fails," it says (I'm paraphrasing here), "restart the machine with the option key down. Select the Windows CD as the startup disc and i tallation will resume." "Ok," I thought. I forced the machine to turn off by holding down the power button and then turned it back on, as the i tructio suggested. The Macbook's hard drive and the CD a eared for me, I selected the CD and the machine returned to the same blue screen. Gue what ha ened?

The same thing. I repeated the reboot proce , and this time it failed again, but with a different excuse: File such-and-such had been identified as "corrupt." How a file on a read-only CD could become corrupt is beyond me, but I initiated the reboot for a third time, and just as inexplicably it worked perfectly. I got her software up and ru ing, booted back and forth between Windows and Mac OS X a few times just to see it work and called it a done deal.

After wra ing up a few niceties (like the driver CD I burned earlier and getting her printer working under Windows) everything seemed to be in order. I know that many have said this before, but it was kind of creepy to see XP ru ing on that gorgeous Mac. I should also note that my trouble seemed to have been with the Windows i taller, not Boot Camp (go figure). Now, you may be wondering why we went with Boot Camp over Parallels or something like Q? Well, cost was a concern, and Boot Camp is free. She bought XP on "Tax Day" (which is a tax-free holiday we have here in Ma achusetts), and Parallels was $70US at Staples (an office su ly and gadget store for the unfamiliar).