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Administrator
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| On Thursday, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Fransisco, Microsoft development manager Andrew Ritz revealed that Windows Vista, the successor to the aging Windows XP expected to be released later this year, will not support EFI booting. Ritz admitted that EFI support will not be seen until Longhorn Server is released in early 2007, and on top of that it will never support a 32-bit processor.
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating system.
This is terrible news for Intel Mac users who have been hoping that they could dual-boot Windows and Mac OS X on their new Macs: not only are their processors not 64-bit (and thus will never be supported by Windows EFI booting) but Windows Vista won't boot on EFI anyway.
"A combination of factors changed our plans. The big one, in my opinion was platform availability. With this huge move to 64-bit based platforms and for us to support it, we needed to see a large heterogeneous sample of 64 bit implementations out there for us to feel comfortable in supporting it." said Ritz.
That sucks for mac people.
AMD64 X2 5200+ 2.60GHz | 3GB DDR 667 | RAID 0 SATA3.0 WD Caviars 320GB total | Foxconn MCP61VM2MA-RS2H Geforce 6100 nforce400 chipset | Vista Ultimate x86
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| | | | Vista Beginner
 
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Last Login: 5/16/2006 9:18:49 PM
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| That sucks for mac users as well as Microsoft, think about how many mac users have bought Virtual PC with a copy of XP, just so they could run some programs not available on a mac platform.
Virtual pc only emulates XP at a certain speed, mac users would probaly stop insulting Windows as much if they could run it natively. It's just like Mactel, if the project was specifically made to run on any generic hardware and was legal to purchase as an OS CD/DVD, I'd get a copy off the shelves.
Although it's Microsoft's decision, it would be a smart business move to allow Vista to support EFI, since Vista could have appeal for mac users & window users, just as I believe that Apple should allow Leopard (Mac OSX v10.5) To run on any mac & pc alike.
When it comes to OSX VS Windows XP, I belive it's no competition but then again Tiger was offcially released 4 years after XP, so Apple IMHO wasn't exactly playing 'Fair' Against XP.
Windows Vista VS OSX Tiger is a pretty fair battle, and I believe Vista a bit ahead of Tiger, but being an owner of an Intel iMac, I've learned that the diffrences between them are nothing more than flavor, as such I've used over 6 linux OS's, but find Windows is the most widely supported OS, just because of how easy it is for programers to make thier software. In the end why can't the OS just live in peace, and become cross platform?
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Administrator
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Last Login: 1/14/2010 1:08:55 PM
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| You make good points. Ive never owned a Mac and I grew up w/ windows 3.1/95 so I am quite partial to windows. But in all Honesty I cant ever see Microsoft allowing their software to run on a Mac, its almost like giving into their competition. I think in the long run not allowing the software to run on a MAC can hurt their sales since all the die hard Mac users would love to dual boot their machine.
AMD64 X2 5200+ 2.60GHz | 3GB DDR 667 | RAID 0 SATA3.0 WD Caviars 320GB total | Foxconn MCP61VM2MA-RS2H Geforce 6100 nforce400 chipset | Vista Ultimate x86
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| | | | Vista Beginner
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Last Login: 5/16/2006 9:18:49 PM
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| That's exactly what I mean, but it's Microsoft's decision.
Even though technically, they wouldn't be giving up to competition as much as owning it...
I mean, they would be turning a mac computer into a PC essentially, there by growing the ammount of users that run windows by allowing mac users to use the OS, even in a dual boot.
I only see growth in that case, it would be more or less Apple raising the white flag.
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Administrator
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Last Login: 1/14/2010 1:08:55 PM
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| Hah yea if Apple resisted or didnt want windows on their Macs, Im sure MS would be all for supporting EFI. lol
AMD64 X2 5200+ 2.60GHz | 3GB DDR 667 | RAID 0 SATA3.0 WD Caviars 320GB total | Foxconn MCP61VM2MA-RS2H Geforce 6100 nforce400 chipset | Vista Ultimate x86
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