I came home from work today to find my family pack upgrade version of Snow Leopard. It’s been a few hours, so here are impressions so far.

The packaging was very small and lightweight and eco-friendly compared to the big-plastic-box-monsters that come out of Redmond.

Apple have released Boot Camp 2.1 which finally includes official 64-bit support on Vista and support for Windows XP Service Pack 3.

This update may mean that 3D games will play without locking up or installing Nvidia’s own drivers and that the track-pad functions correctly again (broken since Boot Camp 1.x)

A troublesome disk (a story for another time) has forced me to reinstall my MacBook Pro and review my Windows partition.

My Boot Camp partition was running Vista Ultimate x86 which felt sluggish, ignored the last 1GB and bugged me with UAC. One Windows update kept failing to install which also prevented SP1 from completing.

I just got the opportunity to try out the latest version of VMware and thought I’d do a quick Windows Experience Index on Boot Camp, Parallels and VMware to see what the performance is like before my new MacBook Pro 17″ arrives (hopefully on Friday!)

When I installed Leopard on my machine I took the opportunity to carve out a dedicated 20GB partition again to put a fresh install of Vista on. As well as being able to boot natively this also now means I can run my single Windows partition switching between native, Parallels or VMware at will which admittedly drives Windows Activation crazy.

Space was a little tight (5GB) after my upgrade to Leopard and so I went on the hunt to free up space and ended up freeing almost 20GB of my 100GB disk — enough to let me set-up a new 20GB Boot Camp partition that will host Vista and take over from my XP Pro Parallels image with any luck.

Disk Inventory X helps identify large files on your system which may no longer be required. In my case 8GB of imported iMovie clips, a 4GB Parallels backup HD image and a 140MB download of Boot Camp 1.4. A few blank DVD-R’s later and I’m almost 13GB lighter.

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:

Parallels have released a beta build of their excellent virtual machine for the Mac and it’s loaded with cool new features. Once out of beta it will be a free upgrade to existing owners.

The feature list runs something like this:

A few weeks ago I managed to screw up my Windows XP installation on my MacBook using some low-level tools and driver related stuff.

I’d already run out of space on the 30GB partition I’d allocated, I was missing the OS X side and not running any 3D applications so I took the plunge to remove the partition entirely and switch over to using the Parallels VM product I’d purchase instead.

I was wondering whether Apple Software Update might search for and upgrade the various Boot Camp supplied tools and possibly drivers.

I did a little digging and couldn’t find the answer but did spot that the Software Update sends a few interesting machine details to Apple’s web server….

This article is now out of date. Check Apple’s Boot Camp page for up-to-date information.

Boot Camp, for those that don’t already know, is a set of tools and drivers for getting Windows XP up on your Mac. The various components are:

This article is now out of date. Check Apple’s Boot Camp page for up-to-date information.

Apple have released Boot Camp 1.1 which, at a whopping 202MB, adds:

I’ve been using my MacBook Pro now for about a month and think it’s the ultimate developer machine. You really are spoiled for choice and everything you might want is at your fingertips.

Every Mac ships with the Xcode developer tool set. This gives you the native preferred Mac development platform called Cocoa which uses Objective-C at it’s core. The actual tools are based around the GCC 4 compiler and GDB debugger with a rather nice Xcode IDE and Interface Builder GUI designer from it’s NextStep origins.

This article was written when Boot Camp had limited device driver support and is now therefore out of date.

Apple’s Boot Camp provides the majority of drivers required including the elusive ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 driver however there are a few devices without official drivers. These are;

This article was written when Boot Camp had limited device driver support and is now therefore out of date.

There are a few annoyances with the MacBook Pro keyboard when in use under Windows XP via Boot Camp. The lack of back lighting and the swapped WindowsWindowsAltAlt keys I can’t help with but the getting the Fn key operational, replacing Alt GrAlt Gr and switching misplaced symbols I can.

Just a few quickies regarding my favorite laptop…

iFixit has published a MacBook Pro disassembly with photographs guiding you each step of the way.

The performance is quite amazing.

World of Warcraft runs nicely under Windows giving an acceptable 20 fps at 1440×900 24-bit color 24-bit depth 1xmultisample1440×900 24-bit color 24-bit depth 1xmultisample with everything turned up high or on. Dropping down the anisotropic to mid-point and turning off the full-screen glow effect and smooth shading bumps that up to 30 fps.

Apple announced their Boot Camp technology — basically a set of drivers for Windows XP, a wizard to help resize your existing disk partition and the necessary magic to load XP from the EFI BIOS.

I can imagine the Windows on Mac Intel project that raised $12,000 USD are wondering why they bothered…