Boot Camp

On my way home from work yesterday I picked up a copy of Windows XP Professional, a couple of games I've been wanting to play (Half Life 2, Far Cry), and got to work installing them all on my MacBook Pro using Apple's new Boot Camp, which everyone has heard about by now.

The installation process couldn't have been simpler. Burned a CD of Apple's XP drivers, repartitioned the drive to allow 20GB of space for XP, rebooted with the XP DVD in the drive, and I was off and running.

When XP booted for the first time, it was obvious a few little things were out of whack. The screen was stretched, for the ATI card wasn't recognizing the dimensions of the MacBook Pro screen (which is a little wacky anyway), and I received a couple of warnings about a lack of internet capability. After installing Apple's drivers however, and rebooting, everything was perfect. The video card rendered XP full frame without any stretching, and the wifi worked instantly. It also notified me that Bluetooth was functioning as well, but I didn't test that out.

So what was the first thing to try out? Games, of course. Besides using XP for occasional web development testing, about the only thing I'd use XP for regularly would be games. So I installed Half Life 2 and Far Cry, and both played beautifully -- Half Life 2 especially. Both games recognized the screen dimensions and played wide screen at the native resolution of the MacBook Pro display, without any detectable frame rate skipping or visual quirks. Both played exactly as you'd expect them to.

But at a very basic level, the fact that I have two operating systems available on one laptop is just incredible. You simply hold down the Option key at startup, pick which operating system you want to use, and you're up and running in seconds. No emulation or sub-par performance. Both run natively and at full speed.

I knew Boot Camp would be a big deal when it was released, but after trying it out myself it feels even bigger. Apple has turned the computer world upside down with this venture, and have given computer freaks little reason to choose hardware from another vendor.

Now we just need some revised PowerMacs (or whatever they'll call them now that they're dropping "Power" from everything) and I'll be all set.

Update: Here's a nice video of Half Life 2 running on an Intel iMac.