Earlier today, Apple released version 2.2 of Boot Camp drivers for Windows. Installation requires Boot Camp 2.1 to have been previously installed as well as Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista.

Boot Camp is included with Leopard and Snow Leopard and lets you install Windows on an Intel-based Mac. Shops or individuals who want to go Mac despite an unavoidable Windows-only application should consider Boot Camp along with virtualization options like VMWare and Parallels. For full information on installing Boot Camp as well as upgrade instructions, manuals, troubleshooting tips and more, look here.

Please note that Boot Camp Drivers Update 2.2 is for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard only.

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about VOIP apps on the iPhone, auto-tagging music, Boot Camp, replacing a hard drive and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about arranging icons on the iPhone, installing Windows via Boot Camp, AirPort networks, iMac rotation support, replacing the video card in an iMac, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

Leah asks:

Is there a better way to arrange icons on my iPhone than by trying to drag them around on the phone itself. I can't seem to get it to work very well and usually mess it up.

Apple provided a better way of organizing iPhone icons in iTunes 9. In the past, I always tried to arrange my icons on the iPhone the same way you do, by dragging them around on the device itself. This isn't as easy as it sounds, especially if you have larger hands.

Now, with iTunes 9 or higher installed and your iPhone connected to your Mac or PC, launch iTunes, click on the Applications tab, and you will not only see the apps you have installed on your iPhone, but the iPhone screens and the placement of the icons as well.

Simply drag the icons around in iTunes and put them in the desired order. The next time you sync, the icons are arranged identically on your iPhone as well. It's so much easier.

Anil Dash has described how to run Windows 7 on a Mac running OS 10.6 -- as a virtual machine -- for free (after you buy Windows 7, of course). It's not very tricky and, according to Anil, works well. Start by installing Windows 7 in Boot Camp and wait while it grabs the necessary drivers (the duration of this process will vary).

Next, eject the Boot Camp disk and enter a few simple Terminal commands. You'll also need VirtualBox, which is free and open source virtualization software. Once you're done in Terminal, launch VirtualBox and browse to the file you made with Terminal. Read Anil's article for the details.

As today is Windows 7 launch day, we're interested in hearing from anyone who has installed it on their Mac, either via Boot Camp or virtualization.

For more, read Christina's post on installing Windows 7 on a Mac (at Download Squad), or Steve's take here. You can get your absolute fill of Win7 coverage all day today at DLS.

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly Mac troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about backing up photos, removing a Boot Camp partition, Snow Leopard and Windows 7, Bluetooth menus, iPhone search results and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

Han asks:

What is the best way to archive photos without using iPhoto? I have about 100 GB of original photos and I have been saving them on my NetGear ReadyNAS Duo. Sometimes I leave the photos in the folder and just copy it to the NAS or sometimes zip them before I put it in the NAS. What I am worried about is if I zip the folder and somehow the zip file itself gets corrupted, is it harder to recover them? Is it better to just not zip and leave it as a folder then copy it to the NAS?

Because photos are pretty important and almost impossible to recreate I take my photo workflow and backup seriously. First, I never import photos directly into iPhoto and instead, using a card reader, copy the files to a folder I have labeled specifically for these photos which resides in my main "Photography" folder.

Wednesday means it's time for another Ask TUAW! For this edition we've got questions about what Macs will support Snow Leopard's forthcoming OpenCL acceleration, using Boot Camp with multiple partitions, connecting a Mac mini to HDMI, automatically importing images into iPhoto, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

It's time once again for Ask TUAW! For this round we take questions about cleaning a malfunctioning Mighty Mouse, opening files and applications with the return key, expanding a Boot Camp partition, finding alternatives to Adobe Acrobat, caring for your notebook battery, and more

As always, your suggestions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!

Sometimes you have to use Windows. Supporting clients in multiple-OS environments makes this a necessity for some Mac users, while others want to run applications that are available in Windows only. You can get a preview of the latest flavor of Windows, Windows 7, by running Release Candidate 1 of the new OS either in a virtual environment such as VMWare Fusion, Parallels, or VirtualBox, or in Apple's own Boot Camp. Christina did a thorough rundown of the options for running Win 7 on Mac back in January.

Of course, you may not own Fusion or Parallels, and perhaps you don't want to have to boot into Windows separately. In that case, you can download a copy of Sun's VirtualBox application (it's free) and then download a copy of Windows 7 RC1 from the Microsoft website (it's free, too!). Follow these detailed instructions or watch the video, and you'll have a free way to test Windows 7 until at least June 1, 2010. Windows 7 will shut down after every two hours of use after March 1, 2010, which is Microsoft's subtle way of telling you to buy the OS or update to a later build.

If you're a VMWare Fusion user, the VMWare team has instructions and a video available here. Want to try out Win7 RC1 with Boot Camp? There are instructions here. For Parallels 4 users, I was unable to find a good set of instructions, so if any TUAW readers can provide me with a link, I'll update this post.

How is Windows 7 RC1 as an operating system? It's faster than Windows Vista on my 3 year old iMac, and some features look surprisingly Mac-like. I'll leave it to you as an exercise to see how much you like or dislike it.

If you're looking for a significant performance boost for your middle-aged laptop, replacing your aging hard disk with a solid state disk (SSD) could give your computer a new lease on life.

Solid-state disks (pictured, bottom) differ from traditional hard disks (top) in that they're not constructed with platters and heads. Instead, they're more like giant thumb drives, containing memory chips designed to be written and re-written without wearing out. The upside to this is that SSDs are much, much faster to read and write to, making booting and starting applications lightning-quick.

I recently installed an Intel X25-M SSD, a 160GB drive, as a replacement for a 120GB Toshiba hard disk for my 2006-vintage black MacBook. Spendy, for sure, but for the performance increase and the extra life it adds to my MacBook, well worth it. Plus, I had my state tax refund burning a hole in my pocket.

The performance is phenomenal. The old disk booted in a respectable one minute, 49 seconds. The new disk booted in a blazing 31 seconds. Ridiculous. Windows also boots in less than half the time it took before. Photoshop CS3 launches in five seconds, Illustrator CS3 in nine seconds.

Getting the drive was simple: It's moving the data that takes time. Read on to see how you can migrate your data like I did -- including a Boot Camp partition -- with little fuss.

This time in Ask TUAW we're tackling questions about syncing iCal between two Macs, using an encrypted flash drive in a cross-platform environment, changing default applications, using the keyboard instead of the mouse, and more.

As always, your suggestions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!

All day on December 25, TUAW presents "Now What?" We've got first steps and recommendations for all the Apple gifts you (hopefully!) found under the tree today. Happy holidays! If you're a Mac veteran, send a link to this post to the switcher on your holiday list.

Merry Christmas, new Mac owner. First of all, congratulations! Welcome to the family. There's some eggnog on the table, and feel free to put your coat on the bed. Setting up your new Mac is a famously easy experience. It should take about 10 minutes, depending on the kind of Mac you bought, and where you want to put it.

Once you have your new Mac on your desk, it will take you through a short setup process to personalize your new machine. You'll choose a username, a password, and will be given the option to register your Mac and sign up for MobileMe, if you want. (You can register and sign up for MobileMe later, if you don't do it now.)

If you bought any applications along with your Mac (like Microsoft Office, for example), you can install them very easily. Just insert the disc, and either drag the application to your Applications folder (on your hard disk) or double-click the installer application. You can eject the disc when you're done by dragging it to the Trash, or pressing the eject key on your keyboard.

For Windows compatibility, get your Windows XP (SP2 or SP3) or Windows Vista disc ready, and double click the Boot Camp Assistant in the Utilities folder (it's inside your Applications folder). Boot Camp Assistant will walk you through the process of installing Windows on your Mac. It's not difficult, but it will take a little time. Once Windows is installed, you can hold down the Option key before your computer boots to choose which operating system to run, or select a permanent preference via the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences. You can read more switcher-specific tips in our Switchers category.

If you're switching to the Mac platform from the PC, I might humbly suggest you read Part 1 and Part 2 of my experience introducing my dad to the Mac. He was a hard-core PC user until he fell in love with his Mac mini.

Continue reading for a few best bets about how to extend and protect your new Mac.

Paragon software has made available a pre-release version of Camp Tune, a new utility for resizing your Boot Camp partition without destroying data. While the Leopard version of Disk Utility is now able to perform partition resizing, it is not able to resize a Boot Camp partition without erasing it (although you could back it up and restore it if needed). Camp Tune runs as a bootable Linux-based CD which allows you to boot your Mac and reallocate disk space between your Boot Camp and HFS+ partition.

Camp Tune for Mac is presently in pre-release and is being offered as a free download (registration required). The download is a disk image that must be burned to a CD or DVD. Needless to say, you should have a backup for both partitions before using any software of this sort.

[via Macworld]

I use Boot Camp pretty regularly, and one thing that always annoyed me about booting back into the world of the living the Mac was that my clock was always eight hours behind (I live in the Pacific time zone). Windows likes to set the system clock to my local time of GMT –8. Mac OS X, on the other hand, likes to keep the hardware clock at GMT, and set it "softly" using the operating system software. There are some hairy registry fixes for the Windows behavior, but they're unsupported.

While manually setting my clock back for the eleventy billionth time, I noticed that just opening and closing the Date & Time preference pane sets the clock automatically. Of course, I had to be connected to the Internet, and have the "set date & time automatically" checkbox selected.

Sensing an opportunity to make my life easier, I wrote myself an AppleScript that simply opens the Date & Time preference pane, leaves it open for a few seconds, and then closes it. I saved it as an application, and set it to run at startup.

That way, by the time my computer is finished booting, the clock is right, and I didn't have to even think about it.

After the jump, some code and instructions on how to do this yourself.

What madness is this, a post about installing Windows? Well, actually, the folks over at VMware's Team Fusion link to this handy Lifehacker guide to trimming down Windows XP to the bare essentials. Obviously this is of interest to anybody running Windows on a Mac, particularly on a portable with limited hard drive space. So if you should find yourself needing to tread on the dark side (whether in Boot Camp, Parallels or Fusion), it's worth a look. Besides, as I always say, the less Windows the better. It's just a shame you have to build it yourself on a machine running Windows with the Windows utility nLite and can't simply download a pre-built virtual machine.