Thankfully, my boss is frugal and when he saw that our companies standard Windows Laptop would cost us about twice as much as the MacBook I got the choice was clear – Cameron gets a MacBook. Admittedly the Windows Laptop would have had a bigger screen, a docking station, and an external monitor, but I’m very happy with the MacBook.

I’ve used Boot Camp 1.0.1, 1.0.2 and 1.1 like most people I couldn’t tell the difference between .01, and .02, but 1.1 was a lot better – in the MacBook I have an abbreviated keyboard – no windows delete key – just a Mac Delete/Windows ? key. That made hitting control-alt-delete (to log into the network) problemmatic. Windows has an alternate keystroke for getting the task manager up (force quit) – Ctrl-Shift-Esc, but without a real extended keyboard I could not hit control-alt-delete to log in until Boot Camp 1.1. It is now fn-ctrl-alt-delete. Right now Boot camp just works – choose on boot what OS to use (hold down option key to pick – similar to multi-booting lots of Linux/Win machines) and it happily is OS X, or Win XP. At work I have an IT department to make sure the firewall, and Anti-virus software is working.

The problem I’m still having with Boot camp is that sometimes when I re-boot it comes up with the wrong time – usually off by 4 hours – I’m guessing it has something to do with OSX and XP storing the Time zone differently so the computer gets confused. I haven’t cared enough to really detail when this problem happens. On the windows side I have a boot script that double checks that the time is right if I’m at the office, In OSX “use network time” usually fixes me up.