Did your brand new iTV just go on the iFritz? Or possibly your iPhone took a cue from Mr. Jobs and prank called Japa-

Wait, they aren't out yet?

Well, maybe these two shiny new pre-release Apple Discussion forums, one for the Apple TV and another for the iPhone, will still come in handy for chatting about everything you need before you lay down your credit card(s). Topics are already flying in these forums, such as whether the iPhone's EDGE data speed is really all that bad, how much the data plan will cost in the first place and how to get your DVD movies into iTunes for transmission to the Apple TV. With all this chatter going on already, you should be well-prepared once these products actually land.

Yes, before you fire off a flaming comment, we know this is The Unofficial Apple Weblog, but we thought it might be nice to post a tip for those of you who either want or need to play with the next generation of Microsoft Windows, reportedly due out within the decade (hey, it was originally due in 2003 - by its present 2007 date they'll be almost half a decade late already). This Apple Discussions forum thread details a slightly more appealing trick for getting Vista, now in a public beta (but overloaded with download requests as of this writing), to install and run with Boot Camp. Basically, you need to have Boot Camp already set up and installed with Windows XP. Then, burn a DVD of the Vista beta you just downloaded. And before you ask: no, unfortunately, Vista won't run on Parallels Desktop - yet. Parallels has publicly mentioned making this work with a future version, but there is no ETA for when this support will land.

Now - and this is the 'at your own risk' part - you need to use some kind of partition manager (the forum poster used one from within XP, but I've heard you can use one that starts up from within the Vista installer when booting from the DVD) to delete an ambiguous partition that Boot Camp creates that is around 180-200 MB in size. Again, we can't stress this enough: this is done at your own risk - you are messing with your boot record and after this step, Boot Camp won't be able to adjust your partitions or blow away and reclaim your Windows partition anymore. Mac OS X and Windows will still boot just fine, but this isn't an ideal setup for the faint-of-heart Boot Camp user.

if you take the plunge and nuke that partition, however, you should now be able to boot from the Vista DVD and use it to upgrade your copy of Windows XP - which in and of itself could spark a discussion as to whether one should upgrade or install clean new versions of Windows; it usually isn't recommended with Mac OS X, who wants to take bets on Windows' ability to have a smooth OS upgrade ride?

If you try any of this stuff out, feel free to post your thoughts on the experience, and then go wash your hands of one of the dirtiest things you can do to a Mac.

A thread in Apple's support forums discusses complaints of crippled clock speeds after installing yesterday's SMC firmware update on Intel Macs. Upon an apparently successful update, some users checked their min and max clock speeds with CoreDuoTemp to find that their max has been limited to 1000 Mhz, even after using utilities to force their machine to work as hard as it can.

I just used CoreDuoTemp to check my own MacBook Pro's clock speeds to find that it's max is set right where it should be, at 2000 Mhz. However, if your Intel Mac's speed is suspect after successfully installing yesterday's SMC firmware update, check out this forum thread to see if something is really afoot in the land of Intel Mac clock speeds.

[Thanks Aaron]