IntelliMac & Boot Camp

Not very long ago, I bought my new Intel 20″ iMac. Its performance is excellent, quite comparable to my dual G5, which itself was very good. If the performance is so comparable, why bother upgrading? In a single word, the answer is, “Intel.”

When onmac.net announced the contest to get XP installed on the Intel Mac systems, I chipped in and paypal’ed some cash to help grease the wheels. When the contest was won a couple weeks ago, I followed the instructions and after a bit of kludging around, installed XP on my iMac. It required making a patched XP install CD, backing up my hard drive, reformatting it, manually creating the disk partitions with diskutil, reinstalling OS X, installing the hacked bootloader, and then finally installing XP.

It wasn’t easy to get installed but once done, it worked. However, the solution was merely a good start. The biggest problem was lack of XP drivers. The most notably absent ones were for sound, display, and bluetooth. That didn’t matter much to me. For the few times I would reboot into XP, it simply was not a concern. I rebooted into Mac OS, restored all my files from my backup drive and then went back to studying.

Then Apple went and released Boot Camp on Wednesday. Sigh. Some bloggers seem to think that contributors to the onmac contest might be miffed at this, having just given money to that contest that seems to have been in vain. Hardly. I’m quite pleased to see two solutions. I, and most others, donated to the contest knowing that it might not ever bear fruit. I don’t know for certain that Apple would have released Boot Camp had the computing enthusiast community not rallied around the onmac contest.

I had a lot of reading to do on Wednesday, which is the perfect complement to installing Windows, since it requires doing lots of waiting. I reformatted my iMac hard drive, wiping off the hacks from the onmac solution. I restored my OS X system to its pristine glory. Then I downloaded Boot Camp. The install procedure was pretty easy. First I had to download an iMac firmware update which adds a BIOS compatability module to the EFI firmware.

After updating my firmware, I ran the Boot Camp installer and installed Boot Camp. You can read all about the installation process at various places online. Needless to say, it is simple and very well documented. The disk partitioning feature is superb. Drag to pick the amount of space you want to give windows and wait a few minutes. Done. Incredible.

I created a 35GB partition, inserted the XP CD and rebooted. XP installed just like it would have on any other PC, except really, really fast. I am quite surprised at how fast XP is on my iMac. I expected performance comparable to my dual 3.0GHz Xeon server but it is quite a bit faster. These Core Duo chips are obviously optimized for Windows. I am duly impressed, but that is not even the best part.

After XP was installed, I logged in and inserted the Macintosh Drivers for XP CD. I clicked install and XP started tossing up tons of little “found bluetooth..,found ATI…, found audio…” messages as the Apple installer installed and configured all the drivers. Sheblam, everything works. It is just that easy.

I can barely describe how much better this solution is than installing Windows on any other generic (Dell, HP, Sony, etc.) PC. Installing XP itself is seldom the bother. After gettings Windows installed, then comes the digging through piles of CDs to find the ones with right drivers. Insert a CD, wait, run the installer. Rinse, repeat. After performing that excercise a number of times, and a similar number of reboots, you finally have a fully functional XP system.

Getting a fully functioning Windows XP on the iMac is so easy! Dell, are you listening? Instead of throwing a pile of CDs into the box that match the hardware, build a custom CD for each system with a unified installer. Click, click, wait, done!

While the Mac drivers for XP were installing, I ran Windows Update and downloaded the 38 security updates. After the drivers were all installed and the updates completed I rebooted. I think that might be an all time record for the least number of reboots required to get Windows fully installed.

Just for grins, I plugged in my 23″ Cinema Display. The screens flickered and my 23″ showed up. After fuddying with the ATI driver software a bit, I got it bumped up to native resolution as an extended desktop. Nice. The only things that don’t work (yet) is the Apple Remote and the iSight camera.

I have little occasion to run Windows so I puttered a little. I downloaded and installed FireFox and iTunes. I disabled Bluetooth, WiFi, and a number of other things to help make XP more secure.

Once installed, there is no difference between running Windows XP on an Intel Mac versus running it on a standard PC. How would I compare Windows on my iMac versus say, my wife’s company issued Dell Latitude? Other than being much, much faster, it is not that different. The biggest difference is not in Windows but in the hardware.

When the iMac is running, you hear the sweet sweet sound of silence. When Jen leaves the room I regularly put her Dell into standby so I do not have to listen to its fans, across the room. Apparently it is difficult or expensive to engineer a quiet computer. Further, the iMac looks nice. It is clean with all the cables routed out of sight. The Dell and its 17″ LCD is…is…I dunno, but certainly not an aesthetic enhancement.

In summary, I really, really like Boot Camp. Apple did a splendid job. Knowing that it will be included as a feature in OS X 10.5 tells me that Apple realizes just how many enthusiasts care about this feature. Mac enthusiasts that care about gaming are dancing in the streets. Many of the switchers who were sitting on the fence unwilling to commit to Mac OS can now buy a Mac without hesitation. They’ll have a great Windows computer that can also run the much nicer Mac OS X.

Prior to Boot Camp, I couldn’t see replacing my second dual G5 (server). I use it as a RAID file server with (5) 300GB drives packed into it. It does the job admirably. However, when Apple releases the G5 replacement I can see replacing it with an Intel version that I can switch boot into FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows and thereby no longer need the dual Xeon.

Further, Boot Camp is only the beginning. Parallels just released Virtual Workstation 2.1 in beta. I installed it yesterday on my iMac. It is a $50 program that lets me create virtual PCs that, on the Core Duo based Macs, run at about 90% of native speeds. It depends on the virtualization hardware that Intel has built onto the motherboard so it doesn’t work nearly so well on the Mac mini (sorry Jay).

For me, Virtual Workstation is perfect. I can run Windows XP or FreeBSD side by side under Mac OS X when I need without needing to reboot. Even better, I can have Windows/FreeBSD display on my second display. How cool is that? One computer that fits into a 20″ display powering Mac OS X in itself and Windows on the external 23″ display?

I created two virtual machines, one running FreeBSD 6.1 and another running Windows XP. Both installed and ran just like they were running on a standard PC. The big difference between Virtual Workstation and Boot Camp is that in Boot Camp, Windows has complete control of you hardware. It runs at full speed and takes advantage of all the hardware. Virtual Workstation places an abstaction layer in between the hardware and the guest operating systems.

Where this really shows up is in display performance. XP under boot camp runs really, really fast and smooth as you would expect with really fast hardware and a kickin display card (ATI X1600). When running XP under V.W. the display performance is no longer “smooth.” XP is still quite fast and VERY usable, but you would not want to be be gaming under V.W., VMWare, or any other similar virtualization technology. For gaming, photo or video editing, or other demanding apps, Boot Camp is and will remain king for a long time.

I’ve uploaded a couple XP sysinfo screen shots here.