For anyone who’s familiar with the old Mac versus Microsoft saga, it’s slightly surreal to hear the Windows start-up jingle on a Macintosh computer.

Put simply, Apple and Microsoft are to computers what Qualcast and Flymo were to lawnmowers in the 1980s. And, a few short months ago, running Windows on a Mac would have been a laughable suggestion.

But Apple has been dropping a few quiet bombshells recently, the most significant of which is that the latest Mac computers now use Intel processors, which makes them much more like PCs inside.

This in turn has led to Boot Camp; a small Apple-developed software utility that effectively allows us to run W indows XP  on Intel-powered Macs.

Boot Camp  is only a public Beta, which means that it’s free to download but is more of a work in progress than a finished product. That said, it’s surprisingly easy to set up and use and, during our tests, it didn’t demonstrate any of the glitches you might expect from software that’s still in development.

The idea is frighteningly simple. Once you’ve set it up, just hold down the Alt key as you switch your computer on and you get the choice between either booting to Apple’s own OSX operating system or to Windows.

It’s a shame you can’t have both running at the same time, but having the choice between the two systems basically offers the best of both worlds.

Apple’s operating system is easy to use and comes with great programs like the iLife 06 suite of photo-editing, video-editing and music-making tools.

Windows XP, on the other hand, has lots more software available for it, games in particular. For those migrating from a Windows PC to a Mac it’s also handy to have your old system available as you make the transition.

There are some drawbacks, however. To use Boot Camp you need to have one of the new Intel Macs. You can’t install it on an older Mac or a PC. We tried it out on one of the latest iMacs with 2GHz Core Duo processor and 1Gb of memory.

It was necessary to fully update our system’s software as well as download the 83Mb Boot Camp program itself. You’ll also need a copy of Windows XP on CD. Early copies of XP won’t work. The disc needs to include Windows XP with Service Pack 2.

Once setup is complete, however, Windows runs as smoothly as can be. In our labs, we ran some performance tests and found that the iMac running Windows actually outpaced several similarly specified PCs.

And what's more, you've got Windows running on a great-looking computer – whether than be a Mac Mini, iMac or MacBook.

The test results for graphics were mildly disappointing by today’s standards, but otherwise Windows on the iMac proved to be very fast and very reliable – as strange as that might sound. The best bit, though, is that it's completely free.

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