Early last week I got my hands on a 2 GHZ Macbook Pro.  It is one sweet rig and I have been enjoying it and all the little goodies Apple tends to ship.  Of course I was dying to try the bootloader posted at onmac.net.  In fact, this coming Sunday had been blocked off for me to try my hand at getting Windows running on Apple hardware. 

Then Apple took away all the fun - Boot Camp was announced yesterday and written up by the "man" himself.  Ah, the apple marketing machine...one to be jealous of for sure! 

With out having to "hack" away at anything to get windows running, I figured I could sneak in trying it out this evening.  It was pretty straight forward, though not particularly quick.  This was my experience:

1. Download Boot Camp - 83 Megs

2. Try to install it.  It yaks and tells me my system volume is not up to snuff. At this point, it would have been nice to get a direct link to download the patch, but the documentation clearly pointed me in the right direction. 

3. I go to Software Update (under the apple menu) and end up downloading about 200 Megs worth of patches and features.  The big daddy was 112 Meg update for Intel based Macs to the required 10.4.6 version of Tiger.  At this point, I put the mac in a corner and let it get fresh with the Apple update servers for a few hours.

4. Reboot

5. Install Boot Camp.  Success....so sweet it is!

6. (Try to) Run Boot Camp.  No XP for me yet!  Oh wait, see a terse message to update my firmware.  Again, no easy link, but direction to find the download on apple site (there was a link in the pdf install guide...but it wasn't clickable).  Getting closer…

7. Find, download and Install Firmware updater.  30 Minutes

8. Sweet, this is only 4 Megs...how long can an update take? XP here I come!  45 minutes later the firmware is updated.  What took so long?  I have no freaking clue!

9. Notice, the Macbook is extremely hot.  Like hotter then my Americano.  Consider stopping the process to let it cool down. Quickly decide to keep going forward.  If it blows up, I'll deal with that then. 

10. Run Boot Camp.  YES!  He Scores.  He dances.  He...partitions his hard drive!  I give XP 30 Gigs for now.  My main reason being to keep it Fat32 (which has a 32 Gig limit) and thus enabling OSX to have full read/write access to the XP partition.   

11. Burn a DVD with the Apple Drivers for XP.  Very nice and painless.  Would have been cool if I could just copy to a flash stick, but hey, that's just downright nitty picky on my part. 

12. Find my cd copy of XP SP2 .  Not sure where I put this, so it takes me another 10 minutes to find it in a box in my closet.  Along the way, I find my smart phone, a bottle of fiber pills (yikes!), and adobe acrobat 6.0.  All things I've been looking for...rad! Okay, maybe not the fiber pills...but I hid those in my roommate’s room so that his girlfriend can find them.  :)

13. Insert Windows CD into Mac.  Get warm fuzzy feeling but something just seems weird.  Not bad weird, but just weird weird.  Click the install XP button on Boot Camp. 

14. Wait...a whole lot.  It's like the longest install of windows ever.  Seriously, took like 2 hours...even with quick format turned on.  Actually, I'm not really sure how long it took as I let the mac sit in the corner and do its thang while I got some other stuff done.

15. Holy Schnikes...the windows boot screen framed in a silver Apple widescreen laptop monitor.  That is too cool! 

16. Enter my Product ID.  Dang, the keyboard feels really good. 

17. Reboot

18. The Windows Shell loads and I'm amazed at how many freaking balloons come up from the system tray.   Apple's isn't too much better, but at least they don't over toast me.  I think I clicked away like 6 balloons! Hey Shell guys....have you noticed this?  I hope Vista has something better.

19.  I slip in the Boot Camp burned disk that has the Apple drivers.  A bunch of dialogs pop up, I click continue on all of them like a good boy and wait for a while - maybe 15 minutes.  Eventually all the dialogs disappear and the computer asks to reboot. 

20. Reboot

21.  Dude.  That's the windows Logo on a Mac.  Hehehe...

22. Try to change my desktop from blue to silver and get rid of the "bliss" background.  Wait, how can I do a right click?  NO!  I try everything I can think of.  Hold touchpad button down for 3 seconds.  Try clicking with ctr, option, and the apple button.  Nothing!  NO! 

23. Poke around control panel and find display options to change desktop settings because bliss image and the blue are making my head throb. 

24.  Think it would be cool to actually use one of the Mac desktop background images in XP.  Go to My Computer and go hunting for the OSX partition.  Whoops…that’s hidden! 

25. Try to figure out how to get right click to work…just to see if might have missed it.  Still no luck!

26. Do notice that the apple key brings up the start menu. Wow…the apple key has been mapped to the windows key.  Ironic?  Awesome?  Yes to both!

27. Notice that the Mac is now about to go super nova and burn my desk down.  I’ve opened my room window and decide its time to turn it off for now. 

28. Not so quick buddy…windows updates are available.  Safety and Security first!

29. Update and then turn off.

30. Think to myself…that was actually pretty easy.  Not sure my Dad could do it though. 

In all seriousness, I’m pumped about what Apple has done and give them props as this is a great piece of beta software.  Everything pretty much worked as advertised.  I wonder if my friend Eric helped out with it?  Eric (or Steve) if you did, here is some feedback (embedded above):

• Please provide a way to right click.  Windows doesn’t work without it.  Actually, I don’t work without it. 
• Mount the user directory from the OSX partition to Windows.  My clever work around for now will be to install Foldershare on both OSes and share a folder between partitions.
• Don’t make me burn a CD…let me use a flash disk!  If I do have to burn a CD, put Itunes, Quicktime, etc onto it along with the drivers and offer to install them on windows for me too.  Heck, install some internet stuff (msn toolbar) and collect a distribution check as well!  
• Seriously do something about the right click.

It’s not quite ready for me to use the macdow book pro all the time as my main laptop, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Leopard has all this solved and I ended up on apple hardware with Vista and OSX side by side in early 2007.   Needless to say, Apple has a lot of interesting opportunities and decisions to make now that I can run Windows on their hardware.  

Two more links that could be handy

• Main Boot Camp Page (Read the right hand sidebar…ouch!)
• Boot Camp FAQ

That’s what I’ve got for now…more to come!