Subtitle: First Impressions of XP on a Mac.
BAM! How's that circularity for you? Yes, folks. Last night, I bravely installed Windows XP Home on my iMac Core Duo and here's a Flickr set of my installation pictures (taken with my camera phone).

What are my first impressions? It's pretty darn fast. Easily the fastest "Windows machine" I've ever worked on (and keep in mind, I used to run labs full of them). The installation was relatively painless, although I did have a few errors on my internal hard drive and had to boot off of the installation disk and run Disk Utility to repair the disk before Boot Camp would let me create the Windows partition. Unfortunately, you cannot resize this partition on the fly, so make sure you give yourself enough room. I thought I had done so, but once World of Warcraft started updating, it quickly ate up all the free space on that drive with its temporary files. So, I have to uninstall and then reinstall. I already activated this copy of XP though... how does that whole business work?

Also, I chatted with Jason Clarke over at our sibling blog, The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog, via email last night, and I think they may be posting some helpful tips for any Windows virgins who use Boot Camp to install XP on their Macs. In the past, TUMW has been the sibling weblog that we've been in a fight with, but since yesterday's release of Boot Camp means that all things Apple will eventually overtake all thinks Microsoft (as if Apple were the Borg), I don't have any problem linking to any such posts which they will produce. *grin*

My two cents: Run all the Windows Updates immediately upon installation and Download Google Pack so you have some spyware and virus protection. Keep in mind: some of those nasty Windows' viruses and worms are geared toward attacking Intel chipsets, and without OS X running interference, there's definite risk to your Intel-based Mac.

Update: Title corrected. I took another pic of TUAW in IE too, but posted the wrong one. *sorry*