Planning to dual-boot your Intel PCs with Apple OS X Leopard, or just want to install Leopard on your Intel PCs? Good news: the folks over at the OSx86 scene managed to crack the Leopard and found a way to install it in Intel-powered PCs, and just the day before its launch date to boot! Installing the Leopard on a hackintosh only requires the following: burnable DVD and USB thumb drive.

BrazilMAC in OSx86 scene managed to work out two installation methods, first of which uses a DVD-RW to make a DVD image of the OS, or just setting up a partition to load the install files from. The steps may look difficult at first glance, but the how-to steps are thoroughly outlined so there shouldn't be any problems in trying it out.

Willing to take the plunge? Check out this short list first before deciding to install Leopard first.


If you're decided, do click on the Read link to check out the steps in installing Leopard on Intel PCs!

The world - and I'm not referring to just the Mac faithful here - has been hearing about Boot Camp for a while now. People have been singing its praises right from the start, and many a reviewer has been putting the program through its paces on his or her computers, trying to see if it's worth all the acclaim.

Personal Tech Pipeline's Michael Brandenburg spent a month running Boot Camp on his MacBook Pro, and has come away handily impressed. As a matter of fact, in his own words, "After a month of having it all in one machine, I wonder how I ever survived with only one operating system."

Firstly, he says, although installation of Boot Camp does require up-to-date software and firmware, it's pretty straightforward - you just need to let the installer do its thing and run the Boot Camp Assistant. Brandenburg's only big dilemma during this process was when he had to decide how to format the new Windows partition: formatting the space as FAT32 gives the Mac OS full read/write access to the Windows drive, whereas creating the drive as an NTFS partition only gives OS X read access. FAT32 is less secure and/or stable than NTFS, and Brandenburg decided to go with NTFS as a result.

Brandenburg also found out that there are a couple of rough patches when OS X and Windows are running on the same machine.

• The Mac OS X can at least read the Windows drive, but Windows can't make heads or tails of the Mac partition. (A product called MacDrive from Mediafour competently takes care of this oversight, but it still is very much an oversight.)
  
• Mac's adherence to a one-button mouse directly clashes with Windows' right-click requirements. This isn't the problem it once was, though, due to the fact that OS X supports two-button mice, and besides, a right-click function of sorts does exist in OS X, as any Mac guy worth his salt knows - hold down the 'Ctrl' key while clicking. (Software applications do exist to make up for this, too.)
  
• OS X and Windows interpret the system clock differently. The clock gets thrown off when switching between the OSs - in Brandenburg's case, by five hours (!). It's the easiest issue to solve, though, as users just have to sync with a network time server to fix it.

Brandenburg finds these glitches merely minor annoyances, though, and says that they'll hopefully be dealt with once and for all when Boot Camp's officially launched with Leopard in 2007.

On the whole, Brandenburg's negative experiences with Boot Camp didn't detract from the ease and convenience it afforded him. He found himself leading some sort of a dual life with his MacBook Pro, running Windows for corporate applications during the day and OS X for personal stuff afterwards. He concludes by saying that Boot Camp "works like a champ to bring the true Windows environment to Mac machines", and adds further that "if the final release straightens out a few quirky driver issues, Apple will have a real winner on its hands." I can't agree more - I'm very much looking forward to Leopard's release to see just how much better Boot Camp will be once Apple's ironed out all its kinks.