It took a while, but Ars Technica posted a reasonably thorough look at boot camp (which allows you to install Windows XP on an Intel Mac) today. Not having an Intel Mac, I’d been intentionally keeping out of the whole thing until someone serious had put it through it paces.

Anyway, by the sounds of it, it all works pretty much exactly as expected. Providing a tool to repartition the hard drive without erasing existing data is a very nice touch, but other than that, there doesn’t seem to be anything much special. It will be interesting to see if Apple comes up with a way to read NTFS formatted disks - I seem to remember reading that it was comparatively very complex, but presumably quite solvable if sufficient resources are thrown at it.

One open question for me is whether you can install XP on an external drive (USB or Firewire) rather than on the internal disk, but I suppose we’ll hear one way or another shortly.

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