XP on Mac severe issues?

March 20, 2006

I found this story on newsvine today which discusses a pretty severe problem with booting Windows XP on Macs if it’s true. This forum thread over at Macrumors talks about an issue with the cooling fans. Here’s a quote from mattbator.net:

According to this thread on the MacRumor forums, the fabled XP on Mac hack also lacks the necessary driver support to control the cooling fans (more importantly, to even turn them on). This has caused alarmingly high operating temperatues and is certainly food for thought for all you hopefulls out there who may or may not be willing to turn their pricey new toy into a pricey new paperweight.

If this is true, I don’t think everyone with new MacBook Pros or Mac Minis should try this just yet. It’s great that they’ve gotten XP to boot on Macs, but the quirks need to be worked out before the faint of heart try it. On a side note, I must say I am very impressed with the group of people working on this. In a short amount of time, they have put up some very detailed howtos and people have even gotten Half Life 2 to work on Mac Minis [1] [2]. Now, let’s see if this cooling fan issue is legit.

Update: It seems this is a non issue after all. (Thank God) I still recommend the faint of heart wait a few months:

Fans have been verified to be working, but are generally only audible under heavy CPU load or when the CPU temperature gets very high. There have been some perceptions that XP is running hotter than Mac OS X, but measurements indicate that maximum case temperatures under XP are no greater than under Mac OS X. CPU frequency throttling is confirmed working on a MBP under XP. Installing the Intel Chipset drivers is recommended.