April 14, 2006 11:19 AM PDT

Boot Camp Special Report: Reader experiences

by CNET staff

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MacFixIt reader Joe offers a synopsis of his experience with Boot Camp:

"Boot Camp Assistant initially refused to partition my hard drive. I had plenty of space, but I went through and weeded out some unneeded stuff and used Disk Utility to verify the disk (it was fine) and tried again. I don't know why, but it worked the second time and the disk was partitioned.

"My MacBook booted off of my Windows XP Pro OEM disc just fine, it began the installation process...after the painful amount of time it takes for the installer to get all of the items it needs off of the disc and launch Windows Setup - the installer quit and I got the 'Session 3 - Initialization Failed 0x0000006F, etc' blue screen.

"I force quit the computer and started over - it did the same thing twice more (argh, this takes forever, and it hasn't even gotten to the actually installation part yet.) Finally, I read online that some people were having trouble with the computers reading their XP discs and had to use copies. So, I went to my Power Mac, fired up Toast and made a duplicate of my XP disc. Sure enough, it installed like a charm without a single glitch from the clone. So strange.

"Apple's magic driver installation disc worked wonderfully as well. Obviously they need to continue writing drivers for the missing components - but, having had to manually install new hardware into Windows machines before, I was amazed that it went off without a hitch.

"The best part is that XP runs faster on my MacBook than on my design PC at work. Of course, there are no third party products installed yet - but the operating system just plain zippy compared to all other experiences I've had.

"Not having a right-click fallback is just silly - the right-click is very important in Windows. However, thanks to the wonderful person that made the 'Apple Mouse Utility' -- it's a non-issue and control clicking invokes a right click as if the trackpad were a mouse. Why Apple didn't program that in, I don't know."

MacFixIt reader Clinton Dyches writes:

"And mein Gott! It works! The '39 minutes' to completely install XP is still somewhat a joke but after installing XP and the Mac drivers disk -- it works like no emulation package I've seen. All printers work... AirPort card... And it's fast (compared to emulation... Can't wait to see benchmarks). Every USB device I've thrown at it has worked... And I have a satisfied giggle when I see that 'NO NAME' drive on my Mac desktop.

"No longer waiting on a Virtual PC upgrade - no more kludging around with OpenOS Wintel."

"Running on my 20" Intel iMac at the moment but will install on MacBook Pro tomorrow.

"I genuinely love the name 'Boot Camp' - you must go through the hell of installing and using Windows but, if you need it, you'll be well-equipped for it. Kudos to Apple for both making this possible and keeping it under wraps."

Gerard Lucas writes:

"I just installed boot camp on my new MacBook Pro (1.8 GHz). Works very fine. The process is easy to enable; Of course the installation of Windows XP is rather time consuming, but once installed, runs very fast. When you are on the Mac OS X You can see your other partition that contains all the data of your "windows partition". I am very very satisfied.. I could even setup my computer to access my airport station. The only thing I don't know yet is how to see my printer which is on the USB port of my airport station."

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