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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Mac mini + Boot Camp = Fun Little Windows XP Machine

So I purchased an Intel-based Mac mini today so I could test Boot Camp and running XP alongside Mac OS X. I'll be writing up a longer review for the SuperSite for Windows, but the short version is that it works pretty well. It's not perfect, however: There's no boot menu unless you know to hold down the Option key after rebooting, which is silly: That should be there all time. And while most of the Mac mini's hardware is supported, the Device Manager isn't "clean," meaning there are at least two devices in there that are not supported (the third is a Kensington mouse, for which I simply haven't yet downloaded the appropriate driver).

While the initial excitement has worn off a bit--after all, this is a base model Mac mini we're talking about here--it's still a pretty interesting setup. My opinion is that a MacBook Pro with a very large hard drive dual booting between OS X and XP would be much, much neater than this. But I'm happy that this is even possible.

Oddly enough, my wife brought up an interesting possibility. (You may recall my wife switched to a Mac mini--from Windows--last Christmas.) She asked me how long I intended to keep the new mini. My original plan was to use the Mac mini for a month or two until Apple released the new iBooks/MacBooks. At that point, I plan to purchase one of these machines or a MacBook Pro, so I figured I'd sell the new mini. But she said that she might actually want it.

This confused me. She's not into upgrading per se, or computers at all, so I was wondering where she was going with this. But it turns out she could actually use XP. She wants to run Microsoft Money, which isn't available for the Mac, and she actually did research about Quicken for the Mac (and I can't stress enough how incredible that is) and she found out it stinks. She had previously asked me if it made sense for her to occasionally use a Windows laptop just for that, and I had told her that would be fine, but had basically forgotten about it. But with a dual-boot mini, she could run OS X 95 percent of the time and just boot into Windows for Money.

Interesting.

Well, maybe we'll be selling her mini soon instead.

[ Posted at 5:10 PM | Permalink ]