Thursday , March 28 2024
Contestant winners successfully boot Windows XP on a new model Apple Macintosh with an Intel processor.

Windows XP Is Now Bootable On Intel Macs

When Apple announced that it would be switching to Intel chips after using IBM chips to run its G3 and G4 computer lines, people wondered at the possibility of running Windows on Apple machines. After months of speculation, a special contest was set up to reward the the first person to successfully boot Windows on to a “Mactel.”

OSx86 Project is the most popular site regarding Apple’s transition to Intel chips. Apple has long said that it would not hinder the efforts to install Windows onto Apple hardware, but that it would not support any such efforts. A contest was set up at On Mac that accepted donations from eager Mac fans to push the development for the dual booting of both Mac OS X and Windows XP.

The contests requirements were (as of March 15, 2006):

1. Instructions must boot Windows XP (at least), not Vista or any other version of Windows.

2. Windows must be able to coexist with Mac OS X and each system may not interfere with the operation of the other (basically a traditional dual boot system where one OS is running at a time).

3. Your method, upon starting the computer, must offer the user to boot either OS X or Windows XP (hint: GRUB / LILO).

4. The first person to post complete instructions, including pictures of the boot process to The Forum will be the winner. Instructions will be peer-reviewed once they are received and once the solution is guaranteed working, the prize money will be transferred via paypal.

5. You give this website the rights to post your solution exclusively.

6. If it is determined impossible to boot Windows on the Mac by March 23, 2006 March 30, 2006 (7 day delay), all donations will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you donated prior to 2006/01/23 2:10pm CST, and you do not wish to donate to charity, I will return your money minus the Paypal fee.

7. You cannot use virtualization software such as Xen or VMWare.

According to OSx86 the contest is now over. Pictures have been floating over the web for the past couple of days showing Windows XP being booted on to an Intel iMac. The pictures are kind of grainy and many people were skeptical. Two programmers “narf2006” and “blanka” were the original posters of the pictures, and they promised a video of the booting in process. The video was posted here and OnMac has confirmed the boot as legitimate.

The instructions will be go to those who donated money to the contest first. Bootleg copies of the instructions will be available, my guess is, pretty quickly after they are made public. Instructions will possibly include an executable file for those of us who are less-computer savvy.

This is seen as a plus to both Apple and Microsoft fans. People saw the Mac as an inferior computer because of the lack of available games. Now, you can run both operating systems on the stylish Apple system and maintain two work environments. I wonder how this will affect software sales? Video game software sales might experience an increase. I wonder about Apple hardware sales. The dual boot is promised to work on all current Intel Macs: Intel iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro.

The total prize of the contest is $13,854. Congratulations to “narf2006” and “blanka.”

About Tan The Man

Tan The Man writes mostly about film and music. He has previously covered events like Noise Pop, Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival, South By Southwest, TBD Festival, and Wizard World Comic Con.

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