Boot Camp is Apple's beta program for running Windows on the Intel Mac computers. Out of sheer curiosity and to give the Mac community a first-hand account of what it takes to install it, I have documented my experience. Boot Camp's competitor is Parallels. I chose Boot Camp over Parallels because I wanted to run PC-only games on my Mac. Under Boot Camp, Windows runs natively, with full access to the CPU, Graphics, and other resources. PC games run fast using all the power of the computer. With Parallels Windows XP runs on a Virtual Machine which means that OS X runs like normal with Windows XP inside a separate application, in effect two operating systems running at once. Thus PC games run slower or not at all.

Boot Camp (beta) can be downloaded from the Apple site. Once downloaded, I couldn't find it on my hard drive to install it. None of the documentation mentioned where the application resides in the hard drive. Spotlight to the rescue. It found it in the Utilities folder.

Boot Camp comes with documentation, which I followed. You have to have OS 10.4.6 with the appropriate firmware installed. When you run Boot Camp Assistant it lets you know if you need to update your firmware or system software.

The next step takes you through the process of burning a Macintosh Drivers CD and creating a new partition for the Windows XP operating system. All the steps are very clearly explained

When you are ready to partition the start-up disk you can drag the divider to set the partition size. This is done without disturbing the original Mac OS X partition; all the software and information remains intact.

I ran into problems at the point of partitioning. I got the following error message:

I didn't want to have to reformat my 100 GB hard drive. I had 23 GB of free space on my startup drive, so I couldn't understand why I couldn't allot an 8-GB partition. After giving a lot of thought about whether to reformat it or not, I decided to reformat.

I was ready to go with Carbon Copy Cloner and a new 160 GB external hard drive. About ten minutes into the cloning process the external hard drive stopped and the process stopped dead in its tracks.

I had posted a question about this to several discussion groups to see if anybody else had encountered the same problem. Someone wrote back that they had received the same error and was advised to persist with the installation and to ignore the error message. I did just that and it WORKED! The only problem was that I had to keep the default partition size to 5GB. I have found since that that is not enough. A better size would have been 10 GB.

Okay, so I was ready to install Windows XP Service Pack 2 on a single disk (a must). That installation went fairly well. The instructions say to format it in type NTFS and FAT with reasons for each. At one point during the installation, the computer screen went black. I force-quit and restarted the computer. Windows finished the installation without any further problems.

After installing Windows, the next step was to install the Mac drivers from the Macintosh Drivers CD. The drivers installed various capabilities such as graphics, networking, audio, Airport wireless, Bluetooth, the Eject key (on Apple keyboards), and brightness control for built-in displays.

The first order of business was to connect wirelessly to the Internet on the Windows side. I have an Airport Extreme Base Station as my wireless router. Windows could not 'see' it. I tried changing some settings in Windows, but was unsure about what or why. I finally gave up and went to the Apple site to read the discussions about Boot Camp. I found one very helpful response titled: Accessing an Airport Network with a Windows XP PC or laptop (with XP SP2), just what I needed, which stated that some wireless routers are unable to 'see' the network to connect to it because it is 'closed.' This was my clue. So I changed it in the Airport Admin Utility and it was seen immediately. Success at last.

In conclusion: Boot Camp (Beta) is flaky to install. The user has to restart each time to go to the Mac or Windows side. This is a pain. The PC-only game Half-Life ran fast natively in Windows using Boot Camp. That was good.