Boot Camp betas head for Boot Hill

By Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 02 October 2007 01:44

Technology

The beta versions of Boot Camp - Apple's software for installing Windows on a Mac - are beginning to expire.

Beta version 1.2 expired on September 30, while 1.3 and 1.4 last until the end of 2007 or the release of a commercial version. Boot Camp will be part of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), which is due this month, so the latter is likely to be the operative clause.

The good news is that an existing Windows installation will keep working happily. Although people talk loosely about using Boot Camp to dual-boot Mac OS X and Windows, the Boot Camp software is only used to take care of the partitioning, installing the operating system and preparing device drivers.

So anyone that used Boot Camp beta 1.2 is still fine, as long as they don't need to go through the installation process again - the Boot Camp Assistant in version 1.2 no longer works. Given that more recent versions featured better device drivers and other improvements, there's no real reason to still be using 1.2.

Some users that don't plan to rush to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 may want to see a commercial release of Boot Camp for 10.4 (or at least an extension of the beta period), but there's no sign at this stage that Apple will oblige.