I'm not a gamer, but if I were, I'd be happy. I don't have to figure out which computers, Macs or PCs, to dole out at work. If so, I'd be happy. I'm not a high-level IT exec who'd like to try out Macs but is afraid of marching too far down a technology path without an out. If I were, I'd be happy. Boot Camp, which will be a part of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," now offers that IT exec just the option he or she needs. I do know this: The next time a Windows user makes cooing noises about Mac OS X, or praises the design and style of my MacBook, I can -- and I will -- promptly fire up XP and suggest that they can have the best of both worlds.

I find it a compelling argument and I think a lot of people will agree. Installing Boot Camp was easy, although it took me longer than expected because I already partitioned my laptop's hard drive right after buying it. Boot Camp only installs on a non-partitioned hard drive. I know this because Apple says so and because I tried to anyway. No dice. That meant backing up my software, reinstalling a fresh copy of Mac OS X and restoring my files.

Note to new Intel-based Mac owners: If you think you'll want to try Boot Camp, don't partition your hard drive. After that, I updated the firmware on My MacBook Pro, checked to make sure that I was, indeed, running the latest version of Mac OS X (10.4.6) and fired up the Boot Camp installer. In a nutshell, it allows you to partition your hard drive on the fly; Mac OS X runs in one partition, the second one is set aside for XP. I chose to give XP 12GB of room, leaving the rest of my 100GB hard drive for Mac OS X.

Boot Camp also walks you through the creation of an installation CD that holds software drivers that allow Apple hardware to work with Windows -- so make sure you have a blank CD handy when you install. After that CD is burned, you eject it, pop in your Windows XP installation disk and sit back and wait.

A reminder: You need a version of XP that has Service Pack 2 (SP2) included. You can't use an older version of XP and then update it to SP2 after the installation is done. And no, earlier versions of Windows won't work. Installing Boot Camp and burning my Mac software drivers onto a CD took only a few minutes.