Thursday, January 12, 2006

At the Macworld trade show this week in San Francisco, Apple executives confirmed that Windows Vista would run on the new Intel-based Macintosh computers that the company is rolling out this year. However, Apple will do nothing to sell or support Windows on the new Macs, and users wishing to dual boot between Mac OS X and Windows on those machines still face some technical hurdles.

One technical issue will require some thinking, at least for XP users. The new Macs use a new type of BIOS called Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), which was developed by Intel. This interface is currently incompatible with 32-bit versions of Windows XP. However, it's likely that an enterprising hacker will create an OS boot loader of some kind that lets customers install XP and then dual boot it with OS X.

Unlike Windows XP, Microsoft's next generation OS, Windows Vista, does natively support EFI, so it should be relatively easy to wipe out OS X and install that OS on the new Macs. And because the Intel-based Macs are based on standard Intel and ATI hardware, Windows Vista will likely prove to be fairly compatible with the system's hardware.