The iMac does Windows!

Macworld reports that hacker have an Intel-based iMac up and running with Windows XP. Here is an excerpt:

Yesterday was a milestone day for the Mac. A pair of enterprising hackers got Windows XP to boot on an Intel-based Mac, and won almost $14,000 for their troubles.We at Macworld sacrificed one of our iMacs and joined forces with PC World to see this first-hand. And indeed, thanks to the hard work of PC World’s Danny Allen, we’ve got a working Windows iMac.

If you’re wondering how this new system works, there’s a massive amount of detail floating around the Web. But the short, less technical version is this: there’s some clever software that makes EFI, the Intel iMac’s equivalent of a PC’s BIOS, act like BIOS. Once that’s installed, you can boot off of a modified Windows XP installation CD-Rom and install Windows as normal. (You’ll need to wipe your hard drive and create two partitions, one for Mac and one for Windows, first.)

Once the installation is done, the dual-boot Mac behaves just like a Mac when in OS X mode. But when you restart the system, OS X doesn’t automatically reboot. Instead, a colorful Apple logo appears on the Mac’s gray boot-up screen. Pressing the up- and down-arrow keys toggles between that logo and a colorful Windows XP logo. Once you’ve chosen which operating system to boot into, press return: you’ll either see the dark-gray silhouetted Apple logo, or an equivalent dark-gray silhouetted Windows logo. And then a normal boot cycle will commence.

Mac users are Mac users because they love the Mac. But some of us, from time to time, need to run Windows — usually for a small collection of programs that aren’t Mac compatible. For anyone who has the need to boot into Windows from time to time, this is great news — because it means that we can stop buying PCs altogether, and just keep an extra partition handy on our Macs.

All I can say is nifty!


2 thoughts on “The iMac does Windows!

  1. Tyler,

    Told you it would happen. Now I just need to save the 2000 for a laptop and take over the world!

    Steve Laroche

Comments are closed.