You can't use windows on intel macs. Here's why...

[Revlimit Punk]

I was thinking about the technical limitations that prevent windows (or any other x86 operating system) from running on a mac with intel processor and i think that the lack of a standard bios isn't the only problem (as reported by the people who tried installing winXP/Vista on their macs).
Given that somebody finds a solution/hack for that, there is still the thermal management problem.

As you might know, all modern macs have software controlled fans... that means that while using windows, the fans, without being controlled by Mac OS X will just spin at full blast, making a lot of noise (try and boot any imac g5 or powermac g5 in single user mode to know what i am talking about).

That alone, i think, would make the experience unbearable (if using windows alone isn't enough by itself ).

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

I was thinking about the technical limitations that prevent windows (or any other x86 operating system) from running on a mac with intel processor and i think that the lack of a standard bios isn't the only problem (as reported by the people who tried installing winXP/Vista on their macs).
Given that somebody finds a solution/hack for that, there is still the thermal management problem.

As you might know, all modern macs have software controlled fans... that means that while using windows, the fans, without being controlled by Mac OS X will just spin at full blast, making a lot of noise (try and boot any imac g5 or powermac g5 in single user mode to know what i am talking about).

That alone, i think, would make the experience unbearable (if using windows alone isn't enough by itself ).

That won't be an issue at all. There's a plethora of applications out there that can control the fan speed of pretty much every chipset out there and even if there isn't one out for this new chipset it really won't take long for someone to come up with one.

 

[Revlimit Punk]

That won't be an issue at all. There's a plethora of applications out there that can control the fan speed of pretty much every chipset out there and even if there isn't one out for this new chipset it really won't take long for someone to come up with one.

yeah that makes sense, but i don't know... it always looked like something that couldn't be easily hacked/reverse engineered to me, since there are quite a few people unsatisfied by their current machines' noise level and there is no software available on the mac (as far as i know) that let's you calibrate fans (everybody just hopes for a fix in the next revision of mac os x).

 

[andiwm2003]

yeah that makes sense, but i don't know... it always looked like something that couldn't be easily hacked/reverse engineered to me, since there are quite a few people unsatisfied by their current machines' noise level and there is no software available on the mac (as far as i know) that let's you calibrate fans (everybody just hopes for a fix in the next revision of mac os x).

o.k. when i have to use windows then noise from the fans is the least thing that would piss me off. the windows annoyance would overwhelm any other problem by far.

but your point is valid. there need to be a set of drivers for various hardware parts to make windows run. but since windows runs on thousands of different hardware setups it should be no problem to make it run on a mac. and there are enough people who would want that. even i would be willing to shell out a few bucks for good shareware to make windows run smoothly.

 

[Jason Bourne]

Wouldn't the more interesting question be: can someone hack the new universal binary OS X.4.4 to run on other maker's Intel based PCs?

Note: I'm not personally interested in doing this. And I'm not personally interested in running Windows on an Intel based mac. I'm perfectly happy running OS X on my G5 Quad for at least a few years, but it seems like there would be (potentially) a bigger "hacker" market to run OSX on cheap wintel hardware than to run windows on (relatively) expensive Apple hardware. Don't know what the relative difficulty would be between the two options.

 

[FireArse]

ok...

but won't it just sound like a normal windows machine then? LOL

 

[cb911]

LOL.

ahhh haha. okay, back to topic.

i thought that it was "ELI" (or something like that, that's replaced the BIOS) is the limiting factor when it comes to using Windows on the Intel Macs. Vista will support this, so it should work? or that's the theory so far. maybe it will just need some fan drivers or something then.

 

[shrimpdesign]

o.k. when i have to use windows then noise from the fans is the least thing that would piss me off. the windows annoyance would overwhelm any other problem by far.

I'm with you. I'm not going to subject myself to pain by putting Windows on my Mac. If I really wanted a Windows application, I'll wait 5 to 6 years for darwine to mature, but only if it's in Aqua.

 

[brettbolt]

As you might know, all modern macs have software controlled fans... that means that while using windows, the fans, without being controlled by Mac OS X will just spin at full blast, making a lot of noise (try and boot any imac g5 or powermac g5 in single user mode to know what i am talking about).

My iMac Core Duo is so quiet that even if Windows couldn't slow down the fan, it would still be very tolerable for me. However, my old G4 is another story! But without an Intel CPU, the G4 never really was a good candidate for runing Windows since emulation slows things a lot.

I think the lack of a standard PC BIOS is what is keeping Windows from running on the iMac Core Duo. The Windows bootup code on the Install CD requires certain functions in the system BIOS (which Apple has probably implemented in a different way than the boot code expects).

I think that to run Windows on an iMac Core Duo, you would need a program that creates a PC BIOS image in RAM first, and then loads Windows.

 

[gammamonk]

The big hang-up everyone mentions is that you can't "install" XP. Well, big deal. Just make a FAT32 partition, and use your favorite drive imaging software to dump a fresh install you just imaged from a standard PC. Use a unix bootloader such at grub, and you should be good to go.

 

[shrimpdesign]

The big hang-up everyone mentions is that you can't "install" XP. Well, big deal. Just make a FAT32 partition, and use your favorite drive imaging software to dump a fresh install you just imaged from a standard PC. Use a unix bootloader such at grub, and you should be good to go.

I'm pretty sure it's not that easy. The problem is, the new EFI won't let you boot the Windows or Linux CDs ... Ars Technica tried. I'm not familiar with bootloaders, but since Apple uses EFI instead of OpenFirmware, I'm guessing that means those Mac-Linux types will have to make a new bootloader.

 

[unixfool]

I'm pretty sure it's not that easy. The problem is, the new EFI won't let you boot the Windows or Linux CDs ... Ars Technica tried. I'm not familiar with bootloaders, but since Apple uses EFI instead of OpenFirmware, I'm guessing that means those Mac-Linux types will have to make a new bootloader.

There are many ways to install Linux without the install CD(s). BTW, gammamonk never mentioned using an install CD.

I'm thinking Grub/LILO should work fine. Those two bootloaders have nothing to do with the BIOS and everything to do with where you want to install your bootloader (ie, MBR or certain drive slice).

 

[jhu]

I'm pretty sure it's not that easy. The problem is, the new EFI won't let you boot the Windows or Linux CDs ... Ars Technica tried. I'm not familiar with bootloaders, but since Apple uses EFI instead of OpenFirmware, I'm guessing that means those Mac-Linux types will have to make a new bootloader.

grub already supports efi. the issue for windows xp is the need for the legacy bios (which apple's efi implementation probably doesn't support) and possibly the partition layout (even efi macs and open firmware macs have different partition layouts).