Boot Camp 1.1 and iSight Under Windows
With its latest release of the Boot Camp 1.1 “Beta”, Apple did what I didn’t think they would. Internal iSight cameras on the current Mac line are now supported under Windows. It’s nice—though of limited utility—to have the camera available under Windows, but then there’s one less thing to distinguish the Mac from its Windows counterparts.
I stayed up late last night downloading the beta and loading it onto my Intel powered iMac. It’s a rather large file at 202.4 MB, and the Apple site was apparently fairly loaded, so the download took about 8 minutes to do. Once I had the file on my desktop, I double-clicked on it to launch the installer and, after giving it permission to run, let it do its thing. Once it completed, it did not ask for a reboot, meaning it was ready to go.
It took me a minute to remember that it installs the Boot Camp Assistant into my Applications/Utilities folder. Once I did and launched it, I selected the “Burn Macintosh Drivers CD” item. I inserted a new CD-R disk into my iMac’s Superdrive and then clicked on a “Burn” button on a dialog the utility had presented. The software burned my Macintosh related Windows XP drivers to the CD as well as an installer and an autorun program. I then rebooted the iMac and took it into Windows XP, inserted the CD, and sat back and watched the installer automatically begin. The only thing required of me was to click on several “Continue Anyway” buttons that popped up when Windows XP protested I was loading drivers which had not received full Microsoft certification. Who needs that? Once the installation completed, I rebooted the machine and brought it back into Windows XP.
Of course, the main reason I was staying up was to see if my iMac’s internal iSight camera really would work. Once the machine was settled back into Windows, I brought up MSN Messenger and selected “Start a Video Conversation” to see if I could use it to contact a friend of mine who was online. Messenger brought up a fairly slick wizard that let me select the appropriate camera, check video quality, and then set my microphone input levels automatically as I read a passage. Once that was done, I received an error message that MSN would not let me connect because my buddy didn’t have a video camera, too. Kind of shortsighted of Microsoft not to design MSN Messenger to host one way video chats like iChat does.
I also cranked up Yahoo Messenger and looked at the video it provided in its Preview window. It was grainy and choppy, nothing like the seamless video I see on the Mac side of the house. If that’s how the video appears to Yahoo users (and I’m using a cable modem for Internet access), then I’m surprised it’s very usable.
In the end, I came away feeling that having the iSight support on the Windows side is nice but still nothing like the experience I get on the Mac side of the house using iChat and AOL servers. I tend to think that most Windows’ users don’t know how good video chatting can be, something validated by comments of a computer savvy nephew when he saw an iChat hosted video chat on a couple of Macs. It may well be that Apple knows this and that’s part of the reason they allowed iSight support on the Windows side. Could it be that one of their ulterior motives was to provide another example of just how good Macs are?
I stayed up late last night downloading the beta and loading it onto my Intel powered iMac. It’s a rather large file at 202.4 MB, and the Apple site was apparently fairly loaded, so the download took about 8 minutes to do. Once I had the file on my desktop, I double-clicked on it to launch the installer and, after giving it permission to run, let it do its thing. Once it completed, it did not ask for a reboot, meaning it was ready to go.
It took me a minute to remember that it installs the Boot Camp Assistant into my Applications/Utilities folder. Once I did and launched it, I selected the “Burn Macintosh Drivers CD” item. I inserted a new CD-R disk into my iMac’s Superdrive and then clicked on a “Burn” button on a dialog the utility had presented. The software burned my Macintosh related Windows XP drivers to the CD as well as an installer and an autorun program. I then rebooted the iMac and took it into Windows XP, inserted the CD, and sat back and watched the installer automatically begin. The only thing required of me was to click on several “Continue Anyway” buttons that popped up when Windows XP protested I was loading drivers which had not received full Microsoft certification. Who needs that? Once the installation completed, I rebooted the machine and brought it back into Windows XP.
Of course, the main reason I was staying up was to see if my iMac’s internal iSight camera really would work. Once the machine was settled back into Windows, I brought up MSN Messenger and selected “Start a Video Conversation” to see if I could use it to contact a friend of mine who was online. Messenger brought up a fairly slick wizard that let me select the appropriate camera, check video quality, and then set my microphone input levels automatically as I read a passage. Once that was done, I received an error message that MSN would not let me connect because my buddy didn’t have a video camera, too. Kind of shortsighted of Microsoft not to design MSN Messenger to host one way video chats like iChat does.
I also cranked up Yahoo Messenger and looked at the video it provided in its Preview window. It was grainy and choppy, nothing like the seamless video I see on the Mac side of the house. If that’s how the video appears to Yahoo users (and I’m using a cable modem for Internet access), then I’m surprised it’s very usable.
In the end, I came away feeling that having the iSight support on the Windows side is nice but still nothing like the experience I get on the Mac side of the house using iChat and AOL servers. I tend to think that most Windows’ users don’t know how good video chatting can be, something validated by comments of a computer savvy nephew when he saw an iChat hosted video chat on a couple of Macs. It may well be that Apple knows this and that’s part of the reason they allowed iSight support on the Windows side. Could it be that one of their ulterior motives was to provide another example of just how good Macs are?
posted by Andy Foster at
5:51 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home