Bootiful!

[Bob Crabtree]

Bootiful indeed!

But what is it?

[herulach]

intel mac, theres never been an easier pipeline

[awm]

Yup. The Mac Mini to be precise. The Intel GMA gives it away, beyond the fact that it look like a mini.

[Stoo]

mac mini with boot-camp.

[Bob Crabtree]

mac mini with boot-camp.

D'oh!



Have to tell you that it feels very odd - but rather lovely - to be able to boot up into XP on a Mac and have it run at full speed, in contrast with my experience using the Virtual PC V5.04 emulator some good while back under Mac OS 9, which was pretty slow (mind you, so was the beige Mac G3 I was running it on!).

Using Boot Camp to set up dual-booting really was a doddle - the instructions provided are first rate - and I noticed some nice little touches, most notably that applet in XP's Control Panel for choosing which OS to boot into.

Having that makes it a doddle to switch between OSs since there is a similar app with the same name in OS X's System Preferences (a sort of equivalent to Control Panel).

Not noticed any significant issues yet under XP - everything seems to be working as expected (including all aspects of wired/wireless networking) - though Apple's own keyboard doesn't have a key setup for PrtScn, so I've had to install PSP 8 to do screengrabs.

Also got OS X working well with my Windows network - wired and wireless - with full internet and email connectivity.

Under OS X, I can print to the Canon printer connected to my main XP PC, access shared folders on all the Windows PCs and have access from them to shared folders on the Mac.

What do people think of the idea of my writing a piece which would help Windows users who are considering OS X know in advance some of the key differences between OS X and XP?

OS X actually has reasonably good built-in help for people switching from Windows (it's prominent in the first help screen, too) but, of course, you only get a chance to see that once you've bought a Mac (or if you can get hands-on before buying).

Either way are there any things people would like me to check about the mini or about its running of either operating system?

Bob

[Bob Crabtree]

Oh, and the message above was written in Firefox under OS X; this one is using IE under XP.

[awm]

It would be interesting to see something like a blog of you using the Mini for a week or so to see how much use you make of it. I think the benifit is in they day-to-day ability to use defferent operating systems on one computer and woudl be curious to get an idea how much you use each one.

[herulach]

why are you using IE? A cool feature for someone to code in to ff would be moveable profile directories, that way you could use the same one on both os's

[Bob Crabtree]

why are you using IE? A cool feature for someone to code in to ff would be moveable profile directories, that way you could use the same one on both os's

Cos I hadn't installed Firefox under XP at the time. It's on there now.

[Bob Crabtree]

It would be interesting to see something like a blog of you using the Mini for a week or so to see how much use you make of it. I think the benifit is in they day-to-day ability to use defferent operating systems on one computer and woudl be curious to get an idea how much you use each one.

Two problems there - 1/ I won't have the Mac mini for much longer 2/ My working week is not one where I need or want to do much with a Mac.

I'm happy to try out anything practical but as for using the Mac day in day out - it's just not going to happen for the reasons I said.

Bob

[Bob Crabtree]

There's an active thread over in lifestyle news about Apple's commercial that knocks Windows by claiming that there were over 114K know PC viruses last year and infer there were none on Macs.

Twaddle, of course, but it's interesting to note that the clean install of XP on this Mac mini had already gathered 10 or so nasties by the time I got round to running Adaware Free and SpotBot Search & Destroy - despite the fact that I haven't visited a single disreputable site.

SpyBot found Avenue A. Inc; DoubleClick and MediaPlex (all tracking cookies) after Adaware had done it's work (forgot to note what that found).

So is it the case that even reputable sites dump tracking cookies on you, or are these programs making a fuss out of nothing?

Also, are there any equivalent freebie anti-trojan program for Mac OS X?


Bob

[Stoo]

Tracking cookies aren't ever a problem tbh, it's just that some of the adaware type programs go a bit nuts when they find them for some reason..

It's not like they hold much interesting in the cookie, all they're there for is to give a more accurate view of their traffic flow across a site.