I’ve been a Mac user since about 1985, starting with a little 512K Mac that was portable, self-contained, and not much more than a toy. But I loved it, and I have owned a never-ending parade of Macintosh since then, upgrading about every twelve months or so. Man, that’s a lot of hardware!

All along, however, I’ve also had to buy PCs, whether laptops or desktop systems, because, well, you can’t run Windows on a Mac, can you? Yeah, there’s Virtual PC from Microsoft but I’ve never had good results running it, even on the fastest Macs I’ve owned.

That’s why when Apple released Boot Camp for its Intel-based computers, I was thrilled. Imagine, a single computer that ran both Windows XP and Mac OS X fast!.

The problem was, it was pretty confusing to figure out how to install and configure the program and dangerous too: do it wrong and you’ll trash your new Mac along with having a messed up Windows installation.

Further, there are all sorts of limitations, including the requirement that you have a brand new one-disk version of Windows XP that incorporates the SP2 updates (that’s ’system patch 2′ for you non-native Microsoft speakers out there).

After looking at all the factors, I ended up buying a new Intel-based Mac Mini specifically so I could experiment with Boot Camp and the new virtualization technologies coming out, and now have what’s likely the single most detailed tutorial on installing and configuring Boot Camp and Windows XP on the entire Web.

If you’d like to see what’s involved in installing Windows XP on an Intel Mac, I encourage you to check it out:

Install Windows XP and Boot Camp on your Intel Mac

Much to my surprise, once I accepted the chance that I would trash my Mac, everything went very smoothly and it all worked out delightfully!

Tags: macintel, mac os x, windows xp, boot camp, dual booting mac