Many of you already know that Apple’s new Macs have Intel processors rather than the traditional Motorola chips. This opens the Mac up to a whole new world of possibilities -- a Windows World!!

Since Intel chips run many PCs, as soon as Intel-based Macs came on the market, people started trying to get them to run the Windows operating system. Now Apple itself has made running Windows on a Mac easy.

Their new program called Boot Camp, allows Windows XP to run on an Intel-based Macintosh computer. This program is not an emulator or a virtualization engine like previous software that allowed Windows programs to run on a Mac. Instead, Boot Camp reconfigures the Macintosh drive so that it can boot to either Apple’s OS X or Microsoft’s Windows XP. (Hence the name Boot Camp!) This gives both Windows and Mac programs full power and performance because they run in their own native environment.

Although the Boot Camp program is still in the Beta testing mode, it is available for free download at the Apple website. I am currently testing Boot Camp on a new iMac and so far, it is getting a passing grade. It is fairly easy to install seems to be quite stable. If you do decide to install Boot Camp, you will be on your own because currently Apple is not supporting the installation and/or use of Boot Camp. There are suggestions, however, that Boot Camp may become a part of Leopard, the next Mac operating system upgrade, which should make its appearance sometime in late 2006 or early 2007. If that is the case, it would then be fully supported by Apple.

The only drawback of Boot Camp is that it requires the separate purchase of the Windows XP operating system, which will set you back $100 or more. Yet Boot Camp is a wonderful tool that will allow computer shoppers to purchase a Mac, use the Mac OS X operating system, and still be able to run PC games and other software that may be unavailable in a Macintosh version. It’s a win-win situation for everyone – Apple, Microsoft, and computer users.