Those of you who have a Mac out there are probably familiar with Boot Camp, those of you who don’t have probably heard of it.  Boot Camp allows those with Mac OSX 10.4.6 or later to install Windows XP and now Vista on a separate partition and run either OS natively without emulation.

Until now Boot Camp has only supported XP, while it was possible to install Vista it was met with several issues including but not limited to driver compatibility problems.  Boot Camp 1.2 Beta was just released and supports installing any copy of Vista on your Mac.

In order to use Boot Camp 1.2 Beta you must have OSX Tiger 10.4.6 or later, the latest firmware, an Intel based Mac (of course), a blank CD or DVD (and a burner), a printer for the instructions (I don’t read instructions, feel free to skip that step but do so at your own risk), full version of any XP or Vista edition as upgrade versions will not work.

Depending on the version of Windows you are installing, Boot Camp will create the appropriate drivers for that OS and burn them to the media of your choice (CD or DVD).  After you have installed Vista it may be necessary to run the driver CD or DVD that you created.  However, Vista will no doubt use at least some of its native drivers to support the hardware on your Mac (it is after all PC hardware).  Feel free to replace the native Vista drivers with the ones that Boot Camp created for you.

Macs now do Windows XP and Vista.  In fact, Macs are the prefect machines for Vista, running that OS natively faster than its own homegrown OSX.  Tell me, how backwards is that?