My life is now complete.

I have been an Apple user for some years now, with an aging Win PC uglying up the study for my beloved MTW and a few old games. When it became apparent that Apple was introducing Intel Core Duo chips into its new laptop line, I decided to invest in a new MacBook Pro. Just a week or so after buying, Apple produced the beta enabler Boot Camp, which allowed the MBP to boot into Windows XP as well as Mac OSX.

I sourced an OEM copy of Windows XP SP2 at a very reasonable rate, and this weekend had the chance to sit and install it. I thought I would share some tips in case anyone wants to follow suit.

You must upgrade your MBP firmware from the Apple site before starting and then download the Boot Camp software. This enabler will almost certainly be in the new release of OSX, Leopard, later in the year. I imagine because of the known hardware configuration, the install went flawlessly - once one thing was sorted out: unplug the Mighty Mouse if you have it, and ideally all USB peripherals save a keyboard. Bluetooth mice and keyboards won't work either, I understand. The reason for this, as I discovered, is that the MM particularly seems to disable the laptop keyboard, so XP will not respond in setup to keyboard commands - a bit of a downer. If, like me, you had never had to deal with a stuck CD before, you can eject it by holding the trackpad mouse button down at reboot.

Boot Camp partitions the drive easily - I chose 15 GB for the XP partition as I was planning to put games and games only on there. It prompts for a blank CD to write all the drivers to. Then you insert your XP disc (only SP2 will do) and away it goes. Just over one hour later, pop in the driver disc and it auto runs and installs all your drivers - the monitor suddenly looks gorgeous again, and Airport and Bluetooth work immediately. Being Windows, one has to go through the virus checker update and stuff as you would with a new install.

To switch between OS's hold the alt/option key at boot up. You can set the default OS in Control Panel (XP) or System Preferences (OSX).

First of all, I installed RTW. This was barely playable on my old PC and I wanted to see what it looked like for real. The install was straight and easy, and it looks lovely! Next MTW with VI and the XL mod.

MTW stalled on the first disc with an error message. Oh No! There was some problem with copying a file, which a suggestion on the Apothecary sorted out. Simply, I copied the first CD over to the hard drive and ran setup from there. The rest of the install went smoothly and now I have MTW running like a dream.

So I have the best of all worlds: A fantastic work computer running OSX with all its ease of use, security and portability, and a play partition with gorgeous graphics and MTW.

It's like Christmas!