interesting article, but you seem a bit too hasty to write your troubles off with the predictable and unscientific excuse of ‘oh its just windows being cRaZy!’.

more likely, these are issues with boot camp which will hopefully be resolved when it gets out of beta. basically, if you want a stable windows XP install i would avoid apple’s boot camp for the time being.

Thanks for the answer! Allright it loos like ‘Parrale’ for me. I will however wait what Leopard has in store for us. Better to wait a few days and know for sure what Apple will bring. By the way: Why would I flame you for providing an answer?

Yes, I love Windows’ Safe-mode. The register is even more fun. I toasted my step-dads old Toshiba desktop for good fiddling around with that. The good news was I convinced him to buy a Mac. Currently, he has a nicer one then me. (A Mac Book Pro) Damn him.

I would temporarily give up on Bootcamp. Parallels is out of Beta, go with that instead. As one poster said, it is true that it is not a “true PC.” I believe, however, most Mac users are not interested in running a true PC. They just want the convenience of running a Windows’ application occasionally. Personally I do not want to leave my Mac environment to do that. Moreover, Apple is promoting Parallels over Bootcamp. That should tell you something.

Do not flame me for this because I am not a grammar champ by any means. My grammar teacher parent, however, always picks on me for this, so I will pass this on to you. Take the advice or leave it.

Apple is a company. It exists independent of any people working for it. So it is not proper to say take Apple at “their” word. Apple is not a they, it is an it. Accordingly, it is take Apple at its’ word.

Years ago, after my first mac (a 4400/200 mhz) I bought an PC (Windows 98) mainly because of games. I more or less thought my computerexperience would be just about the same. I could not be more wrong. What a mistake! What a mess this was. And why couldn’t I fix things myselve? I always ended up having to do a complete reinstall. Ater all that I was a faitfull macuser once again.
Right now I find myselve wanting to install windows on my mac to run some finance-apps. I have not yet installed BootCamp because I’m waiting for it to go out of beta. I have my hopes set on a possibily to ‘freeze’ or ‘write-protect/read-only’ possibility for the windows partition. Letting Leopard sort of ‘contain’ or protect Windows from itselve. What do you think? Would that be possible?

As an ex-Windows user, i can tell I feel just like Poster…

” It’s just the way that Windows is and theres nothing you can do about it”.

Sad to say, but as an ex-Windows user, this kind of dance was my life for a good many years. I wasn’t the best Windows unriddler, but I was good enough to be tech support to all my friends and some of my co-workers. It’s just the way that Windows is and there’s nothing you can do about it.

What you had was a windows problem, not a mac one. You needed to reformat the partition in question and completely reinstall windows. It was possible to fix without all that trouble, but it does illustrate one fine point. The Mac OS X side worked perfectly, the windows side died.

It also proves on other point. The Beverly Hillbillies move into a great neighborhood, and they still eat possum. Windows contained in a gold box still sucks.

If I required Windows for a particular piece of software, I would buy the cheapest PC I could get by with and use that, rather than screw up a perfectly good Mac with Microsoft crap.

Kind of makes you wonder if the problem was related to Boot Camp, the Mac’s power manager or just a Windows glitch.

The fact is that computers and their operating system just have so many variables these days. One piece of errant code and its Blue Screen of Death or Kernel Panic city. My MacBook was giving kernel panics under heavy load, likely do to heat, and should be back from Apple today with a new logic board. My ThinkPad blue screens every second or third CD burn, but only in iTunes or Windows Media Player, never in Nero.

The MacBook’s issue was clearly hardware (my MacBook was one of the initial release batch) while the ThinkPad is clearly a software issue. Sadly the response to both for a busy person is the same, either take the time and/or expense to figure it out, or work around the issues. The MacBook went back to Apple only because I have other computers available to fill-in, while I simply don’t burn CDs on the ThinkPad until the MacBook comes back, at which time its fresh Windows install time.

I must disagree on the Parellels over Boot Camp vote however. I’ve played with both on my MacBook and while Parellels is far more convenient and is quite fast at processor tasks, it still isn’t a real PC. Boot Camp is the real deal, and with the Input Remapper utility (I forget the URL) it is a very good PC, with right click (FN+click or “delete”), the same function key settings for screen and volume as on Mac OS X (FN key required) and of course real native speed and accellerated graphics. Great stuff.