BootCamp Continues
Alt-Media listserv member Wayne Chenoweth recently tested a BootCamped iMac with these 4 applications:
To his surprise, JAWS installed and ran fine. However, it could not find the server for the network license. Wayne guesses this may be an artifict of the test environment in the tech lab. ZoomText had a similar problem until he used the right account, but it also ran fine - even the voices. K3000 had no problems with the read version but he has not yet tested the scan version. He suspects there will be problems with the scanning feature but won't know for sure until he does some trials. Dragon Professional would not install because it wanted a 40 GB partition to install to and Wayne had only created a small test partition. He guesses there are/will be swap file issues there.
On another Mac laptop he tried Parallels, a product that allows simultaneous Windows on a Mac. According to Wayne, "the JAWS install hosed the Windows install completely just like it does sometimes on real Win boxes. Probably the video driver. Watch out for that one."
Wayne's impression of the beta is that this is not an enterprise solution at this time, but more of a toy, or for very limited use of Windows standard apps. Also to note is that BootCamp is a beta expires with no upgrade path. Users will eventually be able to buy OS-X Leopard for the real thing and start all over again. I'm waiting to see what the real product has to offer before going any further with it .
In my trials, I ran into the same problem with Dragon – I partitioned the drive to give Windows 20 GB (about a third of the total available) and figured that would be enough for what I am trying to do. I never before realized how much space Dragon demands. The others I have tried (ZT, JAWS, OpenBook) all worked fine in short trials but I am concerned about long term use in the BootCamp environment. I have been unable to register my copy of Windows because it is a Dell install disk. It is set to expire in 24 ...23 ...22 days and counting. Whe it does I will wipe the machine clean and repartition with enough space for Dragon. In the meantime I will continue my testing with Dolphin EasePublisher.
The website and instructions do warn that doing this to the Mac is not meant to replace the Mac apps or turn your PowerBook into a PC but is designed rather to ease Windows users into the Mac world and to run a couple of programs that are unavailable as Mac apps. On another note - a USB mouse in the Windows environment works just fine and is much better than the touchpad alone.
Labels: Mac
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