Boot Camp

Further to my remarks on Leopard one of the reasons for buying it was to add a Windows partition to my Mac via Boot Camp.

Boot Camp comprises a partitioning tool, support for dual boot and a collection of drivers (on the Leopard install disk) for running Windows on Apple hardware. You need an Intel Mac and a sufficiently recent copy of XP or Vista. In this version only 32-bit software is supported even though I have a 64-bit CPU, but I hear that more recent Macs are shipping with 64-bit capable Boot Camp. 64-bit operation isn't particularly important for what I current want out of Windows anyway (games and the odd bit of software development).

Partitioning was perfectly easy. On booting into the Windows XP installer the keyboard didn't work initially; after I unplugged my USB card reader and rebooted it was OK, however. I'm not sure if this is Apple's bug or Microsoft's but it seems to be a common problem.

The network setup decided to apply the address I gave it to the firewire port rather than either of the ethernet ports. I disabled the firewire port (under windows) and the non-connected ethernet and it was happier. (As with my Windows/Linux dual-boot system) I'd given the Windows partition a different name and address to the MacOS partition.

SHIFT 3 on my UK keyboard produces £, which is not what I wanted; I type # much more often than £. Under Mac OS I was able to select a US keyboard layout but Windows doesn't offer me a US Apple layout (and the US layouts it does have have other keys in the wrong places).

Here's what I did to get around this:

1. Install the keyboard layout creator from http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx and run it
2. Load the Apple UK layout
3. Change £ to # and vica versa, using CTRL+ALT+3 to type #
4. Select Project->Properties and edit the name etc
5. Select Project->Test Keyboard Layout to make sure it works
6. Save the source file
7. Selected Project->Build DLL and Setup Package
8. Quit the layout creator
9. Install the new layout package
10. Go to Control Panel->Regional And Language Options->Languages and make the new keyboard layout the default

Rather surpringly the choice of keyboard layout doesn't seem to be reachable via Control Panel->Keyboard.

I installed the following things without any difficulty:

• PuTTY
• Firefox
• Windows updates (needed 2 restarts)
• IE7
• Starcraft and Brood War
• Rome: Total War
• Warcraft III
• Visual C++ 2008
• RealVNC
• DirectX SDK (March 2008)

Half Life said it didn't like my OS (it predates XP by some years) and needed a patch, but after rather fruitlessly poking around the web for the right thing (which used to be on Sierra's website but isn't any more) I installed Opposing Force and it installed a patch and ran OK anyway.

Digital Scurf?

I found this in a DIMM socket (in a PC). I'm not sure what it is. The socket is at best temperamental even with it removed.

( Photos )