April 6th, 2006
First Look XP Dual Booting on a Mac
By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
PCWorld has released an article on the boot camp patch we posted about yesterday, saying that it works impressively well, including the video drivers, and video games work great as well, saying Doom 3 and Far Cry ran smoothly with the high end graphics options turned on.
In both cases, I had to tweak visual settings manually, since the games automatically set themselves to very low settings. Far Cry, for example, auto detected very low settings, but it ran without a hitch when I bumped the resolution up to 1280 by 720, with all visual quality options set to “High.”
Our 20-inch iMac came with a 2.0-GHz Core Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card with 128MB of GDDR3 memory. That’s roughly equivalent to a high-end laptop machine, and anecdotally the performance I obtained was about what I’d have expected from that type of PC.
So far, working in Windows on the Intel-based iMac has come off without a hitch: If not for the slicker-looking hardware, I’d think I was working on a standard Windows PC with a wide-screen monitor. And that’s exactly what you’d want from a usable dual-boot system. Source: PCWorld
We Say: Sounds impressive. Now I’ll have a reason to finally check out some of the revered apple hardware.
Ran Kailie says:
I think the other side of this is that it’ll give Mac users who pine over windows games that aren’t available on Mac OS X+ will finally have the chance to play those games on their Macs. Sure it means buying a copy of XP, but for people who want to play any of the many games only available on Windows it will be worth it I think.
April 6th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
d says:
Once you go Mac you will never go back…. Now why would I want to mess up a perfect machine with a crap OS?
April 6th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
Charles says:
Does anyone know how a PC laptop stacks up against a PowerMac? Since the OS is no longer an issue, is Apple a good performance value.
Or do I have to factor in the “cool design” into the equation too?
April 6th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
Stephen says:
I’m not interested in Apple hardware or design. The stuff just doesn’t seem to be designed to be really friendly to us tinkerers. Besides, I don’t mind having my PC under my desk or my Shuttle unit in the living room. But I do know I won’t be able to stand that big, globby white plastic thing sitting on my desktop. That’s why I have a Samsung display in one room and a Dell in the other…no speakers…minimalist…with wireless keyboard and mouse.
As of June I’ll have 3 years on the big build it yourself PC without one bit of hardware trouble…all components hand selected by myself to my specifications. When Apple can offer me the same level of customization, down to the case, then I might consider looking into it or they make their OS able to run on non-Apple hardware. Right now I don’t see a reason to spend the extra on “design” that isn’t for me. By the way, not a gamer, 53 years old so I don’t go in for those wildly modded or overly plastic cases larded up with neon and LED’s. I just like to make my own decisions to whats in the case and not have them made for me.
And did I mention that I’ve not had XP crash on me once in 3 years. Also, I don’t spend all that much time in protecting my PC from virii and spyware. Its all setup to run and update automatically. I barely even have to think about it. No viruses or spycrap installed in 3 years and I download and install software and other files all the time. Just really careful.
April 7th, 2006 at 7:39 am
ed3 says:
When the MacInteloshes start showing up in school/government/whatever auctions without OS/hdrive/whatever, it’ll be easier to get a useable OS (Windows) on them…
April 7th, 2006 at 8:34 am