Installing XP on an Intel Mac: One Man’s Experience

Macworld’s Rob Griffiths writes about his attempts to install XP on his Intel Mac mini. He describes his experience in some detail, both its good and bad aspects. XP’s installation and configuration, he finds, is hardly for the faint of heart – and is expensive to boot, since you need to purchase quite a lot of hardware and software beforehand if you want it to work.

But after Griffiths muddles through the procedure, he ends up with an extremely fast, fully native copy of Win XP on his Mac. The OS is selectable with a simple keypress at startup, and most of the Windows hardware and nearly all the Windows software he tries works more or less as well on his Mac as it did on Windows. He cautions his readers that the process is far from foolproof; should anything go wrong during installation one might need quite a bit of technical expertise to recover. As it is as of the moment, installing Windows XP on an Intel Mac is still very much in its initial stages.

While we’re quite impressed by Griffiths’ article (that’s professionalism for you!) and of course by his results, we’ll pass for now. At least until the procedure improves. It’s a terrific achievement, of course, but so much could go wrong, and so easily at this stage.

If any of you folks follow his lead and give it a try, though, please tell us what results. We sure would like to hear from you!

Macworld’s Rob Griffiths writes about his attempts to install XP on his Intel Mac mini. He describes his experience in some detail, both its good and bad aspects. XP’s installation and configuration, he finds, is hardly for the faint of heart – and is expensive to boot, since you need to purchase quite a lot of hardware and software beforehand if you want it to work.

But after Griffiths muddles through the procedure, he ends up with an extremely fast, fully native copy of Win XP on his Mac. The OS is selectable with a simple keypress at startup, and most of the Windows hardware and nearly all the Windows software he tries works more or less as well on his Mac as it did on Windows. He cautions his readers that the process is far from foolproof; should anything go wrong during installation one might need quite a bit of technical expertise to recover. As it is as of the moment, installing Windows XP on an Intel Mac is still very much in its initial stages.

While we’re quite impressed by Griffiths’ article (that’s professionalism for you!) and of course by his results, we’ll pass for now. At least until the procedure improves. It’s a terrific achievement, of course, but so much could go wrong, and so easily at this stage.

If any of you folks follow his lead and give it a try, though, please tell us what results. We sure would like to hear from you!