OS X Mountain Lion Bible

Running Windows on Your Mac

One of the most remarkable capabilities of the Mac is that it can double as a Windows PC, thanks to the use of Intel's processor chips beginning in 2006. Any Intel Mac—but not the earlier PowerPC-based Macs (which don't run OS X Mountain Lion either)—can run Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 8. (Some users also have been able to run Windows 2000, though it is not officially supported.) OS X comes with the Boot Camp tools to set up Windows 7—not earlier versions—on your Mac as a separate environment, so you can choose to boot into OS X or Windows when you start up your Mac.

Note

OS X Mountain Lion shipped before Windows 8 did, so Boot Camp didn't officially support Windows 8 when this book went to press. But Windows 7 Boot Camp partitions seemed to work when upgraded to Windows 8's beta version, and it's likely that Apple will formally add Windows 8 support after its final release.

Two other companies, Parallels and EMC's VMware subsidiary, provide inexpensive virtualization software ($80 each) that lets you run Windows XP through 8 and OS X Lion and Mountain Lion at the same time. (They also let you run the Linux and Unix operating systems, as well as OS X Server.) If you use Windows applications routinely, I recommend you use one of the virtualization options instead of Boot Camp because they make it so much more convenient to use Windows without making you stop using your Mac applications. They install Windows in what is called a virtual machine, a disk file ...