Since narf2006 and blanka announced their solution for booting Windows XP on Intel Macs last week, many aspiring dual-booters have been posting on the OnMac forums trying to get Bill's baby running on Steve's systems. We thought, what can we add to all of this? Why, we can boot XP on a 20" iMac, a MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini Intel Core Duo all in the same room, of course. And we can make all three of them remotely access a fourth Mac system via VNC, so we're looking at Mac OS as a window in Windows XP Pro.

(This is all 100% legal, by the way. Apple has said it's not opposed to booting other OSes on Macs - Linux has run on Macs for years - and our copy of Windows is legally licensed.)

Installation isn't difficult, thanks to the guides now available at the OnMac Wiki. The major hurdle is that each of the three systems required a different version of the xom.efi file, the bootloader which lets the system choose between Windows XP and Mac OS. We also had to tweak the video settings while installing Windows on the iMac, though once Windows was installed it had no problem running at the full 1680x1050 resolution of the 20" screen.

We're not about to play Doom 3 on any of these machines - there are still no video drivers available for the iMac or MacBook, making graphics pretty slow. But we got Ethernet, wireless networking, and the headphone jack (but not the internal speakers, iSight or the remote) working using drivers suggested by OnMac.

Why do this, other than that we can? Well, we saw our friends at ExtremeTech boot Mac OS X on a homebrew Intel box last year, so we wanted to match that feat. More importantly, this opens up a world of Windows software to Intel Mac users, especially since there's no Intel-optimized version of Virtual PC, Microsoft's official solution for running Windows programs on Macs.

PC Magazine Desktops maven Joel Santo Domingo (at right in the picture above) ran some benchmarks on the three machines, and came up with surprising results. The MacBook Pro is the fastest Core Duo laptop we've tested running the Photoshop scripts. It's faster than other laptops originally designed for Windows. This bodes very well for the performance of an Intel-accelerated OS X Photoshop, when that finally appears.

Of course, we have photos. Check out the whole XP Mac family, the Windows system properties for each of the three machines, and some stages in the install process.

Updated : Many of the comments below request comparisons to other PCs running the same benchmarks. Here are a bunch of Core Duo laptops you can compare the MacBook Pro to. Scroll all the way to the right to find the Windows Media Encode and Photoshop CS2 tests. As you can see, the MacBook Pro beat four other Core Duo laptops on the Photoshop test, though it came in behind them on the Windows Media test.

The two Mac desktops outran even blazing-fast single core systems, which typically do the Windows Media Encoder test in 10-13 minutes. We haven't tested any other Intel Core Duo desktops, but the iMac competes well against a Polywell machine with a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+, while the Mini and MacBook Pro are held back a little by their slower laptop hard drives. Predictably, all the Macs blow away the Shuttle XPC M1000, which has the previous generation single-core Pentium M processor. That system scored 16 minutes on Windows Media Encoder, and took 2:52 to complete the Photoshop script.

In other words, Apple makes fast Windows PCs.

Updated 4/24/06: If you're interested in info and benchmarks for Boot Camp, Apple's official method for running Windows XP on Macs, read Cisco Cheng's report on PCMag.com.

Through breathing, the human body is said to exude odors, or volatile organic compounds (VOCs), if a disease is present. As a result, researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo are building an inexpensive chemical sensor that will act as a breathalyzer to detect diseases.

According to TechnologyReview.com, the device looks like a roll of quarters and contains "an array of xerogel sensors and a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) detector." Xerogels, glass-like materials with nanoscopic pores, would be able to detect complex chemical patterns for recognizing specific diseases. The team has already built sensors that respond to 100 different chemicals.

If by any chance the device works, researchers hope that it will be useful for detecting diseases early on, not to mention prolonging our lives. We already know that some diseases are difficult to catch in the beginning, so having such a device could very well change all that. Let's hope so anyway, considering the plethora of diseases my father's side of the family is carrying!!

For more information on the Disease Detector, read Suny Buffalo's news release.

We have a lot of Macs in PC Labs, but we also like Windows. So what could be better than getting them all mixed up?

Check out the pictures below or return to the main story about booting Windows XP on a Mac.

From left to right: an iMac 20" running Windows XP, a MacBook Pro running XP, a Mac Mini running XP, and an iMac G5 20" running OS X 10.4. The XP machines are connected to the OS X machine using the VNC remote desktop software, and have the OS X desktop open as a window in XP.

A slightly better zoom on our XP Macs, showing the Start menu on each one.

The screen of our iMac 20", with a VNC window showing the OS X connection and the Start menu showing that yes, this is Windows XP.

Installing Windows XP on our Macs was tedious, but went relatively smoothly.

Check out the pictures below or return to the main story about booting Windows XP on a Mac.

Some highlights of the process:

We started by wiping and repartitioning our hard drives in the Mac OS X 10.4 installer. After dividing the drives in two,  we installed OS X on the bottom partition and booted into OS X without trouble.

Adding narf and blanka's special sauce -- a file called xom.efi -- and telling the system to boot to that file let us select between Windows and Apple icons while booting. We picked Windows, and dropped in a somewhat customized Windows XP Professional SP2 CD.

Getting the installer to work on the 20" iMac required tweaking some video settings and trying not to be scared by this very strange screen that popped up.

Windows XP setup ran pretty much like it does on any Windows machine, and we got our machines up and running smoothly. One problem, though: none of them shut down properly. Oh, well. It's an alpha.

In case you've wondered what a Mac running Windows XP has to say about itself, here are the system properties boxes from our three machines.

Check out the pictures below or return to the main story about booting Windows XP on a Mac.

The first image is for the Mac Mini Core Duo, followed by the MacBook Pro and finally the iMac 20". Notice that with 2 gigs of RAM and a slightly faster processor, the laptop is the most kitted out of the bunch - though the laptop is also throttling down to 1 Ghz to save power.

If you've ever amused yourself playing with cloning in image-editing programs, you'll be entranced by this prototype from MIT's Media Lab. The IO Brush has an embedded camera that can take both still and motion shots. Built-in force sensors cause LEDs that surround the camera to turn on whenever the bristles are pressed onto a surface. You can then "paint" whatever you've shot onto an interactive screen.

To see some kids using the brush, take a look at the fascinating video at MIT's site. (And don't miss the nutty soundtrack!)

[MIT Media Laboratory, via ShinyShiny]

I'm moving in two weeks (don't worry, I'll still be on here), and I've been trying to find a unique, yet simple alarm clock for my nightstand. But, I probably didn't have to tell you that, considering my last few posts have been about clocks.

Here's a clock radio called the Gellule. It's designed by Pascal Bardel, and comes in many fun colors. This jagged little pill is a single alarm, radio/buzzer with an LCD screen. The color part is the speaker and also acts as the volume control by rotating it.

Sadly, I don't see any links to buy the Gellule...so it looks like I'll have to keep on looking.

[via Techie Diva]