How to run Vista on your Mac with Boot Camp

• Article 53 of 89
• MacFormat, July 2007

After years of waiting, finally Windows Vista is upon us all in all its many flavours: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. It’s expensive but brings Windows up to the level of OS X in many levels, and even has a few tricks of its own.

Thanks to the Intel chips inside every new Mac and some mighty fine work by the engineers at Apple, it’s possible to run Vista on your Mac and still have your Apple-specific hardware, such as the iSight and Apple Remote, work perfectly. You’ll need the latest version of something called Boot Camp, which Apple has recently updated to support Vista. It’s available as a beta now from http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ and will be included in Leopard (OS X 10.5) when it’s released.

Unlike virtualisation software, such as Parallels Desktop, Vista won’t be running on top of OS X with Boot Camp: your Mac will be just like any PC and you’ll have to reboot to use OS X instead of Windows. It’ll run faster than under Parallels and it’s the best way to run Windows games on your Mac, but you’ll have to be more careful than with Parallels as well.

For starters, you’ll need to repartition your Mac’s hard drive and choose to set aside a portion permanently for Windows. This could potentially destroy all the data on your hard drive, so you’ll need to back everything up first and checked for any problems with the disk using Disk Utility. You’ll also need to have updated your Mac with all the latest firmware and have a blank CD or DVD to hand to install the drivers necessary to make Vista recognise your Mac’s hardware. Lastly, you’ll need to have a keyboard connected directly to your Mac or a built-in keyboard, because wireless keyboards won’t work while you’re installing Vista. If you meet all those requirements, you’ll be ready to go with our tutorial. Good luck!