Macs booting Windows. How about that.

By now I’m sure you’ve heard that Intel Macs will be capable of booting Windows XP using an officially supported product from Apple called Boot Camp. You can certainly read about the technical details on about a million other web sites, so please go ahead and do so now if you’re not familiar with this new development.

You’re back already? Great. The only point I want to make here is that this is not a threat to the Mac or OS X in any way. It’s a nifty trick and nice for folks who need to run one or two Windows apps or maybe want to play Windows games.

Apple’s products have always been of a higher quality because their ability to control all the pieces of the solution. I realized that when I switched back to the Mac about two years ago that it was a compromise in some senses. No, your Mac won’t run any random piece of software you find on the Net, play all the newest games, or connect to any crappy peripheral. But in exchange for that, you get a much better product overall that is integrated and well-designed.

Another way to say it is that you’re rewarded with a better experience and less problems if you use your computer in the way Apple would like. And as I get older and my time gets more valuable I’m more and more willing to just go with the flow on that one.

But again, the secret to making it great has always been hardware/software integration, going all the way back to the Apple I. I only recently learned how closely the two worked together and how that really resulted in a fantastic product. In contrast, I offer this:

A recent Windows adventure

I have a TiVo Series 2 and I want to watch the recorded shows on my computer. Of course, TiVo doesn’t support this as of now (if they ever will), so I resigned myself to doing some circumventing to make this happen.

Side note: In my opinion, the whole TiVoToGo thing doesn’t even work that well on Windows. You double-click your transferred files to play them and the aspect ratio of Windows Media Player is all jacked. WTF.

Anyway, the app I found to convert the TiVo files into plain MPEG-2 files required that the .Net runtime 1.1.4 be installed. After checking Add/Remove Programs, I saw that I merely had the 1.0 version of this fabulous runtime installed. (The fact that you need to go to Add/Remove Programs to check this is an issue I’ll ignore for now.)

I couldn’t see an easy way to upgrade, so I uninstalled that and clicked the button in the app’s installer that was supposed to take me somewhere I can download the correct version from.

But of course that would be too easy.

Microsoft’s .Net web site has changed, probably multiple times since then, and the only obvious link points you to the download for the 2.0 version of the .Net runtime. I figured, “this is probably backward compatible, so I’ll download this one.”

But you can tell already that this isn’t the case.

So, I uninstall the 2.0 version and find the link for 1.1 SP1. That’s gotta be it, right?

Of course not. It didn’t even install. Apparently, all that package does is update .Net 1.1 to .Net 1.1 SP1. (I’ll set aside the fact that we’re applying Service Packs to a runtime.)

Finally, I found the link to download the proper 1.1 version. I installed it, and it “worked.” By that I mean it did what I wanted in the end but looked crappy, annoyed me, and took forever.

I can’t wait to bring this wonderful user experience to my Intel Mac hardware. :)

But seriously, folks, if you want to go deeper into the topic of Windows-on-a-Mac, check out John Gruber’s excellent (as usual) writeup.