because the .com was taken
Today beta testers of Boot Camp should have gotten an email (if they provided a legit one during the download process) that Boot Camp on their Tiger installs is going to officially expire on December 31st. For those that might not have given a real email, you can view the contents of what was sent out here:
Apple had already taken down the Boot Camp download some time ago. If you are not going to upgrade to Leopard than it looks like you might be out of luck.
The news is hitting the web that the Apple Boot Camp download for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” is gone. SO what does this mean for you guys still running Boot Camp? Nothing too detrimental. Your Windows partition and install will still work. The only thing that won’t work is the Boot Camp utility after the expiration date. Boot Camp is not officially part of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” now. But never fear, Boot Camp isn’t the only way for you to install Windows. Boot Camp was just an on the fly partitioning utility. You can still use Disk Utility to partition your drive and use the boot menu (holding Option during boot) to choose your Windows boot CD to begin installation. And of course for those who are planning on snatching up Leopard you have Boot Camp coming to you.
Lucky for me I keep a backup of huge downloads like Boot Camp, so if for some reason I need to install Boot Camp 1.4 before my Leopard disc comes I am covered.
Well, here comes the big news, Apple’s Boot Camp is already starting to expire for users. For those who don’t know, Boot Camp is the nice little live partitioning utility and driver set to help install Windows on an Intel based Mac. Boot Camp 1.2 has already expired (Sept. 30) but hope is not lost as 1.4 is still running strong. So be sure to update if you rely in any way on Boot Camp.
I am currently using Boot Camp 1.4 running Windows Vista Home Basic for all our RocketDock testing. So I am hoping that either Apple releases an update to bypass the current expiration date or Leopard gets here quickly. Either way if you aren’t planning on updating to Leopard it is gonna cost you to continue using Boot Camp under Tiger.
A little bit ago I was talking about the possibility of PolyVector and myself switching to VMWare Fusion instead of sticking with Parallels Desktop. After some extensive testing we found out a few interesting things. VMWare Fusion was working fine on my Mac until I started getting into network shares. PolyVector had an awful time working with VMWare on his MacBook. It would continuously slow down and freeze during every start of the virtual machine. So after some careful consideration we have decided on the following setups for each, PolyVector will continue to use Parallels (we bought it so why not continue to use it), and I will be using Boot Camp for the added bonus of having a completely native install of Windows for testing. The only downside of my own setup is that I can only have one copy of WIndows installed at a time. Hopefully the finally version o Boot Camp will allow for more than one copy of WIndows installed on a single hard drive at a time.
Recent Comments