Filed under: OS, Software, Leopard
Leopard's Boot Camp brings 'fast switching' between Mac OS X and Windows
Thanks to you TUAW readers, tips are rolling in on all the tiny and not-so-tiny features that Mac OS X Leopard will be bringing in October. One feature that is definitely not-so-tiny is something I'll dub 'fast switching' between Mac OS X and your Boot Camp Windows installation. While this isn't quite the built-in virtualization that some users were hoping for, it will minimize the startup, shutdown and boot times when switching between the two OSes. Detailed on Boot Camp's new features page, Apple has hooked their safe sleep feature into Boot Camp to allow Mac OS X to save all your open applications and windows, and then boot over into Windows. Once you're done in Windows, you can boot back over to Mac OS X and pick up where you left off - with all your open applications and documents put right back where you left them.
This is a great idea and an interesting compromise between making it a little too easy to run Windows on your Mac, and it also keeps Apple from stepping on the toes of virtualization products from companies like Parallels and VMware.
Thanks, Daniel
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Chris Utopian said 4:30PM on 6-11-2007
thats nice! BTW has anyone noticed apple.com has spotlight now? do a search! also safari 3 has auto spellchecking if it didn't have it already
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Mark D. said 4:43PM on 6-11-2007
This is perfect! I had often used Hibernate on XP to speed up reboots, but lamented the limited treatment deep/safe sleep had on OS X.
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Aron Trimble said 5:07PM on 6-11-2007
I wonder how parallels will work with this... For instance, if I have a parallels app on my dock, can I launch it and wake up my windows install? When I close it will it put my Windows install back to sleep and allow me to "fast switch" back to my windows install?
Hmmmm...
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Michael Rose said 5:56PM on 6-11-2007
Aron, I'm pretty sure this feature (which apparently is doable but unsupported in Tiger) won't affect Parallels. The hibernation setting means that Mac OS X is shut down, all the way shut down, with a large file on disk representing the state of RAM prior to hibernation. When you reboot into Mac OS X, the hibernation file is read back into RAM and you're back where you were. Search the site for DeepSleep for a widget to do this now.
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JeffDM said 7:43PM on 6-11-2007
Hibernation is faster than booting, but in both OS X and Windows, it's still not what I call fast. Maybe at most, 2x faster, so it's still a one or more minutes affair to switch, depending on RAM size, system speed and so on. It's definitely not as fast as "fast user switching" that the ad hoc name seems to reference.
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Ryan said 8:50PM on 6-11-2007
Won't this slow the computer down if it is maintaining these states, though? I don't see myself using this too often unless it has zero hit on performance in both Windows and OSX.
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Michael Rose said 11:12PM on 6-11-2007
Ryan: The only performance hit is at hibernation and thawing, as the contents of RAM are written out or read in. The other resource cost is the disk space to store the hibernation file.
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gtjuggler said 12:29AM on 6-12-2007
Its gone! The information is gone!
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/bootcamp.html
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basscadet said 3:21AM on 6-12-2007
I still don't see why it would be bad to "make it too easy to run Windows on a Mac". What does OSX have to fear from XP or Vista????? It would, in fact, help me run all those nice small apps that automate much of my workload and not maintain a networked PC next to my G5. Oh and games too. Macs are tools I work with, not sacred altars that shouldn't be defiled by heretic MS software...
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Alex Oughton said 5:53AM on 6-12-2007
This strikes me as extremely dangerous.
If Mac OS X is suspended before going to Windows, and then the user runs MacDrive within Windows, then severe data corruption can occur when MacDrive makes a ton of changes to the OS which the suspended Mac OS X won't know about.
Similarly, if the user suspends XP/Vista and writes changes to FAT32/NTFS drives within Mac OS X and then returns to Windows, severe data corruption can occur on those drives too.
They *MUST* know this. Hopefully they've thought of something better than a warning every n00b on the planet will decide to ignore.
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