Vista Runs On Macs

Mac owners have figured out how to install and boot a pre-release version of Windows Vista on their Intel-based machines, messages on the OSx86 Project's Web site claimed Sunday.

Unfortunately, to run Vista on an Intel-based iMac, the Mac OS X operating system has to be deleted, wrote a user identified only as "AirmanPika."

"When you get to the section where it asks where to actually install vista....well here's the main problem," wrote AirmanPika. "You delete all of them. Even OSX. Yes this isn't a dual boot solution (yet anyway) but it does allow vista to run."

Another poster, dubbed "alexoughton," said that he had managed to install Vista without removing OS X by deleting the EFI partition that Apple's Boot Camp application creates.

Both users relied on Boot Camp, the application Apple released last week that lets Intel-based Mac owners create a dual-boot system that runs either Mac OS X or Windows XP.Some analysts last week, however, downplayed Apple's dual-boot campaign. in an online brief last week, Gartner analyst Michael Silver called Boot Camp just a "safety net" for Mac users who wanted to run Windows applications, and said it wouldn't make Macs any more attractive to enterprises.

The significance of the dual-boot setup, said Silver, is that it showed Apple is serious about letting Windows run on Intel-powered Mac hardware, and that it paves the way for Apple Computer to support a "hypervisor," or virtual machine system, that would run Mac OS X and Windows side-by-side.

The OSx86 Project, which specializes in information about running Mac OS X on the x86 platform, and now Windows on the Intel Macs, was last in the news when Apple demanded that the site pull a patch that allowed Mac OS X 10.4.4 to run on a vanilla PC powered by an Intel Corp. x86 processor.