Boot Camp.

I am writing this article with the assumption that anyone reading this does not follow any Apple news. Since Apple announced that they were moving their whole computer product line to Intel processors, everyone assumed, or at least speculated, that we would be able to install and run Windows on Macintosh computers from now on. Well, shortly after the first Macintels were released earlier this year, people began attempting to boot into Windows on to them. It was soon realized that such an endeavor was "impossible" since the new Intel Core chips used, what's called, EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) to boot operating systems, where as all other chips boot using a BIOS. And of course, Windows XP needs to boot with a BIOS. However, the macintel "hackers" did not despair as they were sure Vista (Microsoft's next operating system due next January) would boot with EFI. It was then announced that Vista would still be using BIOS. All hope was lost. THEN, a contest was initialized that awarded an ever-growing cash prize to the first person who could get Windows XP to boot on an Intel Mac. Fourteen Thousand Dollars later, two guys were able to do so. Soon there after, instructions were posted all over the WEB. Naturally, there was a catch: Windows wasn't able to interact with most of the Macintosh's hardware; i.e. you could not go online, run processor-heavy videos (I'm not sure if you were even able to watch any moving pictures whatsoever). In fact, you could only really run Solitaire and Notepad (and any other basic app Windows came bundled with). This was not as exciting as hoped... Well, last week (Wednesday), Apple came to the rescue with an application entitled Bootcamp. It offers an easy installation program for, you guessed it, install Windows on your Mac. Even though a nice installation application would have been nice by itself, Apple also released a bundle drivers that allowed Windows to interact with all the Mac's hardware (save the built in iSight and backlighting on the MacBook Pro's keyboard). This now means that you can run Windows exactly as you would on a Dell box. And even better... ...this means that I can buy an Intel Mac Mini and continue to enjoy Mac OS X whilst occasionally indulging myself in ... TIBERIAN SUN & STARCRAFT & AGE OF EMPIRES 2. These are my favourite RTS (real-time strategy) computer games ever; gaming was essentially the only thing I had to give up when "switching", except for all those oh-so-essential tabs in MSN Messenger. Now I can have it all. DEATH TO NOD!