According to the latest Boot Camp instructions bundled with the new Mac Pros “if you have a Mac Pro introduced in late 2007 or later, you can use a 64-bit version of Windows Vista”.
This additional support is not something that Apple has announced, and I don’t know anyone who’s ever run the 64-bit version of Windows (mainly because the driver situation with the OS is still making it almost impossible to use). Still, if you have a new Mac Pro and you want to runt the 64bit version of Microsoft’s OS, you apparently can.
In other Vista and Mac related news, Microsoft has eased up on their ToS, and Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium are now eligible to legally be run in a virtual machine (like the ones created by Parallels and VM Ware’s Fusion). While I seriously doubt that Microsoft’s ToS have been keeping any of you from installing Vista on your virtual machine if you really wanted to, it’s nice to see Gates and Co. officially allow it – so that companies can officially support it.
Thanks to Daniel for sending this in.
3 thoughts on “Boot Camp now supports 64bit-Vista, more Vista/Mac news”
Very interesting. I never thought I’d see the day when something like this would happen. Te real question though, is why would anyone want to run Vista on a Mac, at least at this point. XP maybe, but I just don’t know about Vista.
I have just installed Vista Business 64-bit onto my Macbook, replacing Vista Ultimate 32-bit, and it works perfectly using the drivers from the new Mac Pro version of Boot Camp (torrent them!). I had to get the video card drivers off intel’s website and it works flawlessly – no driver issues at all. I haven’t done any benchmarks, but I can now play Portal without the frame rate dropping to an unplayable level when you, you know, fire a portal. Also, all 4GB of ram can now be seen. I say it’s worth a try.
I did the same on my MacBook replacing 32 with 64. But the only driver that doesn’t work is the Atheros wireless driver. Can’t get online. Anyone have the same trouble? Craig?