Leopard Boot Camp "fast switching" disappears
Last week we pointed to an interesting addition to Apple's Leopard Boot Camp page: support for faster switching between Windows and OS X using safe sleep in OS X and hibernation in Windows. Well apparently something has changed. As Mac Rumors notes, Apple's page itself has been altered and references to the faster switching have disappeared. Originally it the page included the following:Leopard brings a quicker way to switch between Mac OS X and Windows: Just choose the new Apple menu item "Restart in Windows." Your Mac goes into "safe sleep" so that when you return, you'll be right where you were. It's much faster than restarting the computer each time. Likewise, a "Restart in Mac OS X" menu item in the Boot Camp System Tray in Windows makes for a faster return to Mac OS X. With Windows hibernation enabled, you can pick up where you left off.Mac Rumors has a Google cache of the page that shows the original text. Now Apple's page is simply missing that section. I hope this returns in the final release, because it looked like a great feature.
[via The Apple Core]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
basscadet said 10:23AM on 6-17-2007
oh c'mon, that's like punishing those who want to use Win for games and small apps not available to OSX. Are they so full of switchers from XP to OSX that they don't want any more to join? Or are they afraid ppl will pay all that money so they can use only Windows on a Mac????? Then again, maybe that feature doesn't work that well and they're taking it out...
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jim said 10:25AM on 6-17-2007
I had assumed (from Apple's now-deleted description), that you would still have to restart (as in reboot), but the load time would be faster if the other system was in hibernation/safe-sleep because it wouldn't have to go through all the usual start-up tasks.
Can anybody who got the beta at WWDC confirm how this actually works on that version?
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Chandler said 10:38AM on 6-17-2007
In the MacRumors article, there is a quote:
"I have it on good report from someone attending WWDC that this feature has been nixed.
He mentioned this feature to the Apple BootCamp build engineer. Who responded that this feature will not be supported. The engineer then called the Apple BootCamp program manager who "freaked out". Within an hour it was removed from the website."
So I don't think it's going to be in there.
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Solipsism said 11:01AM on 6-17-2007
This is either completely false or there is a huge chunk of info missing from this story.
• Why would Jobs tout this as a new feature if it wasn't possible?
• Could there be a legal reason why it won't be done? (I can't think of one)
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MajorMauser said 11:33AM on 6-17-2007
I would be willing to wait (even More) for Leopard..... come on Apple don't let this be a lackluster release. There should have been more done with Finder. I hope Apple has more up its sleeves.
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Gist said 11:46AM on 6-17-2007
Oh get off it. It's one small feature... one that will save 4 people minutes a year.
And if Apple has plans of supporting this deal-breaker of a gimmick, I'm sure they could slip it in 10.5.1 or what not.
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Naz said 11:58AM on 6-17-2007
Maybe its been removed because its not actually "fast".
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Hawkman said 12:09PM on 6-17-2007
Welcome to last week!
Seeing as the text was removed within hours of people noticing it, I'm gonna go along with the couple of reports of it being killed. Bit of a shame, but it's not exactly a major feature anyway.
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Jon said 12:35PM on 6-17-2007
#5: Isn't the whole purpose of computers to make things easier and save time? And I think you'd save a lot more than 4 mins a year.
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daywatch1814 said 1:27PM on 6-17-2007
All features referenced in the Mac OS X Leopard website are subject to change.
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JeffDM said 4:07PM on 6-17-2007
Gist; I don't think you understand the impact.
Using hibernate & safe sleep allows the system to remain at the state it is in, rather than shutting down all programs in use and later having to restart them. If you use a lot of programs, I don't think it's inconcievable that it could save four minutes each time it is used. A lot less time needs to be spent relaunching programs and opening all your files to the way they were.
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Robert said 4:49PM on 6-17-2007
Seriously... This would drastically improve the life for us developing web sites, and instantly need to switch between operating systems (and where you sometimes need to test things in the "real" environment, compared to Parallels or VMware Fusion).
I can understand that there may be many reasons why they won't implement this in the next version. What annoys me with this, though, is that the information is there, initially, and then just removed. No information, no minor press release, nothing. If you remove such a feature statement, you need to stand up for removing it.
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Mark said 5:31PM on 6-17-2007
Just use parallels and be done with it. No gripes and new Version 3.0 rocks!
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Joshua Ochs said 5:22PM on 6-17-2007
While I had looked forward to this feature as well, it seemed to have one major flaw - filesystem integrity.
When you put a system into safe sleep or hibernation, there is the assumption inherent that when it wakes up, things will be as they were left - nothing in the underlying filesystem should have changed, of Bad Things (tm) will happen. For the most part, this would have been taken care of since the Mac can't write to NTFS and Windows can't write to HFS+.
However, as soon as you factor in things like FAT32 partitions, MacDrive, MacFUSE/NTFS support, all of this goes out the window. Sure, you can say such things are unsupported, but it could easily become a situation where people inadvertently cause MAJOR damage to their systems. And since the damage to the OS would come when you're booted into someone else's OS, there really wouldn't be a thing Apple could do to prevent it.
At least, that's my figuring. Looks like gamers will have to do a full reboot, and everyone else can buy VMWare.
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Foo said 10:32PM on 6-17-2007
Just use VMWare Fusion. The beta4 is free, it works really well, it supports VMs with one or two processors, 64-bit computing, and large memory, wider support on other host platforms is available, unlike Parallels the system load is nearly zero when the guest OS itself is idle, and the final version can be purchased right now at half price ($40).
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Brian said 10:50PM on 6-17-2007
Just get Parallels and a LOT of memory, it is MUCH QUICKER than this feature would be had they left it in. Then, you are OK for all except games. If you don't have time to reboot for a game, well, you don't have time to be playing games...
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Digital Dada said 11:25PM on 6-17-2007
Perhaps this is a just an attempt by Apple to maintain a healthy relationship with the other software companies out there who have helped Apple push the 'do Windows on a Mac' approach. Does anyone seriously think that Apple can't manage to put this feature in the OS? Of course they can. But they choose not to because they want their customers to use the Mac OS, and be able to use Windows 'when they need to' rather than all the time. Why would Apple lead the charge to bypass their own OS in favor of Windows? Instead, give users a means to do it, but then let other developers handle doing it better with 3rd party products. Think about the gum commercial where the gum lasts so long, that people stop buying gum. Steve Jobs is too smart to let Apple go down that road.
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John Laur said 11:18AM on 6-18-2007
I agree that even though it sounds fantastic, the feature should be removed for the trouble that it could cause. As it is, nothing currently prevents you from hibernating windows then rebooting into OS/X currently so long as you know what you're doing.
I don't think there is a way to force OS X to enter its safe sleep mode though. The only hacks I have seen are to enable safe sleep on machines that don't ship with it enabled (such as older powerbooks, mac mini, etc.) Does anyone know if you can force OS X to hibernate?
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Ben C said 8:28AM on 6-18-2007
This feature was one of the things I was most looking forward to along with possible ZFS support. This release blows. I'm sticking with Tiger unless there's some compelling reason for me not to. This Bootcamp improvement was one of them.
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Jay Wollmann said 9:07AM on 6-18-2007
I don't really think this is that big of a deal. When you buy a mac you bought it because of the sleek hardware and the extremely stable and valuable software. If you put windows on your mac, it generally isn't going to be for primary functions that you do constantly, and if it is, you'll use paralels. Generally the restart time isn't a huge deal because it isn't a time sensitive job.
Jay
http://www.airdistributors.com
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