If you recently purchased a Mactel (Intel based Apple computer) in hopes of dual booting Windows XP and MAC OS X Tiger, think again.  Currently, Windows computers use PC Bios to boot to Windows and the Mactel uses Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) to boot. The hype with dual-booting Windows and Apple on the Mactel happened because of the initial Longhorn\Vista’s support for EFI. Guess what? It is not going to happen. In recent news, Microsoft will not support booting from EFI with the initial release of Vista. Shocking isn’t it? The clincher here is that you will never be able to boot Windows from EFI on the 32 bit platform.  

Microsoft will have EFI support with their 64 bit version of Longhorn server. Don’t get too excited; the 64 bit version of Windows will not work on the Mactel because it is only 32 bit at this moment.

If you bought this computer for dual boot purposes, you might want to check your receipt. I would. The Intel Mac is very pricey.

If you really want to dual boot Apple and Windows, hang tight. I believe that Apple is working on a 64 bit version at this moment. It would be foolish not to.