Ah, the crazy things we do to play a silly computer game known as Civilization, or in this case Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword expansion. Each and every version of Civ comes out first for Windows and some months later for Macs. And so, each and every time, I have to obtain, borrow or build a Windows PC with sufficient hardware to get on board as soon as possible. Actually, having an excuse to build a Windows PC out of cheapie hardware and spare parts lying around the house is fine. I learn a lot in the process and improve my familiarity with Windows at a gut level. And that makes me a better family IT director.
But this year, just days after Civ’s BTS add-on pack arrived I was scheduled to go on vacation. No lugging the PC along. Hmm. I run VMWare’s excellent Fusion but Civ’s hardware requirements are pretty steep and the game relies on one of the very latest versions of Microsoft’s multimedia environment known as DirectX. So what to do? Apple’s Boot Camp program allows you to create a wholly separate Windows machine on your Mac. It’s not running in a virtual machine inside of OS X. It’s actually using your beloved Apple hardware to run Windows with no Mac software in sight. Look ma, no hands. It’s well reviewed and doesn’t hamper your ability to run OS X most of the time so I decided to give it a spin. And I have a bunch of copies of different versions of Windows Vista lying around that I picked up at a CompUSA store closing sale some months back for pennies on the dollar.
Following Jason O’Grady’s excellent advice on buying a new MacBook Pro, I was ready. Instead of paying through the nose and suffering lengthy shipping delays by ordering a customized MBP, I bought the bottom-of-the-line, plain vanilla guy at a nearby Apple Store. Then I saved big time by upgrading the memory myself. And I went with the good folks at Techrestore for a hard drive upgrade because I’m just not that good with an infinite number of little screws and they offer overnight service. This was my second Techrestore upgrade and I give them a high marks all around. Downloading Boot Camp from Apple is easy and the install took less than an hour. With a 250 GB hard drive in the house, I was able to allocate a comfortable 50 gigs to my new Vista partition.
Boot Camp is yet another piece of Apple’s well thought out software additions to OS X. It installs a control panel in Windows and a system preference item on the Mac to set the default operating system when you turn on the computer. To boot instead into the minority choice, you don’t have to reset the default. Just hold down the option key and a pre-boot screen comes up letting you select which OS to start up. Once in Windows, everything is pretty Microsoftisized. You can’t read stuff on your Mac partition unless you install a program like Mediafour’s MacDrive. On the flip side, right from OS X, you have read-only access to your Windows partition from OS X, at least in the case of Vista.
Vista is still Vista, as I whined and complained the other day. It asks for permission before doing things like renaming an icon or starting up a common program. But it is what’s for dinner on the majority of the world’s computers and game publishers gotta go where they gotta go. Now I can play Civ glitch-free on my Macbook Pro. And at least there’s still Firefox and WordPress. I’m finishing this entry from Billg’s world. See you back in Jobs’ world soon.
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