Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Apple Boot Camp does Vista

March 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Apple Boot Camp does Vista

TAGS: Apple

Apple delivered a new beta of Boot Camp, 1.2, yesterday, complete with support for 32-bit Windows Vista.

Rather than updating my Boot Camp install, I wiped out my old partition and reinstalled and it was as smooth as can be. A new drivers CD complete with support for iSight in Vista is the next step, and this was smoother than in the past too.

After all, I was up and running, with Vista's Aero Glass feature at full speed on my Core 2 Duo MacBook with 1.5GB of RAM.

Vista has been supported by Parallels for a while, but as I understand from the blogosphere, Aero is not working in that virtual setup. I am not sure, and have not tried to "map" Parallels to my Boot Camp Vista install yet.

I tried to get Parallels to run using my Boot Camp install as the drive and it would not work, but a Parallels spokesman said the engineering team would be delivering an update to enable it shortly -- firm date not yet set.

I recently tried VMware's latest Fusion beta, which touts the ability in Windows XP to support DirectX natively while running virtually, potentially giving VMware a leg up on Parallels for one primary reason anyone would want Windows on a Mac: gaming.

But it is currently experimental and only works with XP Pro. Fusion is well behind Parallels Desktop in many other areas, but I would expect it to catch up soon.

I personally find booting into Vista to be no big deal for my home machine -- and that would seemingly be the faster performer; however, on my work Mac I need Parallels so that I can run IE6 inside Mac OS.

Boot Camp 1.2 beta's support of Vista could provide the best of both worlds... Will report back. But Anyone out there running such a setup and able to confirm Parallels mapped to new Boot Camp is getting better GPU performance, or if it even works yet?

Posted by Mike Barton on March 29, 2007 12:17 PM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: