Leopard's Boot Camp brings 'fast switching' between Mac OS X and Windows

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.

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...

Its gone! The information is gone!
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/bootcamp.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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