Yesterday, as some of you know, the Public Beta 2 of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system came out, allowing anyone who wanted to to try out the OS. As I just got my new Intel iMac and am very excited to try out running x86 operating systems on it (yes, even Windows), I decided to turn to the dark side and download the public beta of Vista. Armed with Parallels Desktop RC2, I thought that the Vista install would go very well. Not true. First off, trying to boot into the Vista installer fails as Parallels Desktop is currently not ACPI-compatible, though the Parallels team said that they would incorporate this into a future version. And when I tried to install Vista over an XP installation, it said that my computer wasn’t Vista-comaptible. In fact, currently the only way to get Vista running on a Mac is Boot Camp. Unfortunately, Boot Camp isn’t working for me and I don’t have a backup drive, so I can’t try out this method. The instructions for installing Vista using Boot Camp are pretty simple, though it does require you to do a lot of messing around with your partition table, which can lead to problems. But once again this brings up the question — why would you risk destroying your OS X partition and screwing up your Mac’s hard drive just to run an operating system with features OS X already has?
What a good point! No need to install something that you already have - AND THEN SOME. I guess it's just cool to say, "Yeah, I can run this OS and this OS, when I need to use this proprietary piece of junk software...yeah."
Yeah. Vista is just XP with some OS X graphics and features. Installing XP through Boot Camp would be all a usual OS X user could possibly need. Until certain programs are Vista only.