Apple’s Boot Camp beyond the expiry date
Stories about Apple’s Boot Camp and the looming expiration of the 1.x beta versions to coincide with the release of Mac OS X Leopard and Boot Camp 2.0 are abound.
To clarify there are a number of pieces of software which make running Windows on a Macintosh, they are:
- EFI firmware update with legacy BIOS support
- Boot Camp Assistant (partitioning tool)
- Apple’s Windows drivers (iSight, touch pad, Apple Remote etc.)
- Apple’s Windows software (Software Update)
- Third-party drivers (Intel, ATI, Nvidia, RealTek etc.)
The license to use Boot Camp will apparently expire when Leopard is released however the Boot Camp Assistant will expire 1st January 2008. To re-partition your disk after this date simply set your clock back to any time during 2007 then launch the Boot Camp Assistant. I have tested this and it works just fine, just remember to set your clock back afterward ;-)
Other components are unlikely to expire as:
- the EFI firmware update was never part of the Boot Camp package but a separate prerequisite
- the third-party drivers are available directly from the vendors
The only real question is whether the Apple-provided drivers and software for Windows will continue to function. I believe they are unlikely to expire and if they do it only covers non-essential functionality like the keyboard back light, iSight driver, Apple Remote etc. many of which were not even present in earlier versions of Boot Camp. The touch pad functions as a standard input device (albeit in a more basic mode) without Apple’s drivers.
As Douglas would say Don’t Panic.
[)amien
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