What is Boot Camp?

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Boot Camp is a technology built into Intel chip-based Macs that allows you to create a separate partition on your Mac OS hard disk that can run Microsoft Windows. This separate partition is created from within the existing Mac OS hard disk without deleting any of your existing Mac data — it goes without saying that you need plenty of hard disk space to create a Boot Camp partition.

Boot Camp is probably the only technology that lets you run Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows on the same hardware without any virtual machines. This means no emulation is required and you are running Windows on a normal computer; Apple hardware is functioning like just any hardware from HP, Dell, Lenovo, Sony, or Toshiba–or any other vendor.

Earlier versions of Boot Camp let you run Windows XP and Windows Vista, but Mac OS X Lion only lets you run Windows 7. After you install Boot Camp, you can hold the Option (Alt) key on your Mac’s keyboard to bring up the screen that you see in the Figure below. Here you can choose to boot into either the Mac OS X or Windows 7.

You can also set either Mac OS X or Windows 7 as the default boot — you will learn about this process in a future blog post. In future blog posts, you will also learn more about what you need to install Windows using Boot Camp, and how you actually complete the process.

Meanwhile, you can learn more about Boot Camp on the Apple site.

Typically all sites that I end up visiting are created by geeks for geeks — I tried in this post to make things very simple — simple enough for a 10 year old to understand and yet relevant to you even if you are a geek — if you want to share some feedback, do get in touch through this feedback form — have a great day!