Dual-boot iMac
- November 30, 2006
- 7 comments
The other day my PC died a horrible death. It was working just fine about a week ago, but when I went to turn it on Monday morning, nothing happened. I checked several things and eventually figured the power supply had gone bad. When I pulled it out of the case, I could hear something rattling around inside of it. Definitely not supposed to make noises like that.
So I went to Best Buy and bought another cheapy PSU. I got it all setup and clicked the power button… and nothing happened. Well, not nothing. The power light came on for a split second and the CPU fan started up for a bit, but then everything shut down again. It wouldn’t even go into POST. I tried everything I could think of, but nothing worked. I’m guessing when the PSU died, it took either the motherboard or CPU with it too. Lovely.
So I took the PSU back to Best Buy to get my money back. I then did something I never, ever thought I would do. I bought a copy of Windows XP Home! Took it home and used Apple’s Boot Camp to partition my iMac so I can use both OS X and XP Home on it.
Installation was a cinch, and after installing all the drivers from Apple, it really flies! Windows never looked so good! Actually, it still doesn’t look good, just better. Using the Royale theme definitely helps.
I also have a copy of Parallels Workstation and used the same XP Home CD to create a virtual machine in OS X. I had some problems trying to use the XP product key twice, but I called Microsoft tech support and got it all worked out. So now I can run XP at the same time I’m using OS X. Makes it soooo much easier to check my sites in IE6/Win. It’s quite fast. I don’t notice any real slowdown, but it’s definitely not setup to run games or serious 3D. If I want to play a PC-only game, I just reboot into XP! Quite a nice setup, in my opinion.
Uh… you will love their new beta:
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=5997
How about just maintaining one copy of windows in BootCamp and having Parallels boot from it? Sound any good? Or how about making your windows apps look like they are running natively on your mac. IE7 testing heaven 
(of course there are still some bugs to work out but I think this is their best release yet!)
Paul
December 6, 2006
I couldn’t use OEM with Boot Camp. I went out and bought a retail copy of XP Home. I tried using the OEM CD I had from my dead PC, but I couldn’t get my keyboard to work.
I could use it with Parallels, but only to install. I couldn’t activate XP Home with the license number off the back of my PC. And Microsoft won’t help you out if it’s OEM. I already tried that route.
I have Parallels on my 24” iMac as well and it’s just the bomb. I’m running XP pro with IE6, another XP pro with IE 7, Win2000 with IE6 and even Ubuntu Linux. The speed is just great it even boots faster than my 2.8P4 which I still use to play the occasional PC game. My bet is a lot of webdesigners are going to want this kind of setup sooner or later