In the past, I've played around with Apple's Macbook notebook and Vista, using Boot Camp, a bit of experimental software from Apple that allows Windows to run on Macs with Intel processors.

The attractions of running Vista on Mac hardware would, at first glance, appear to be pretty slim, especially if you are a firm (nay, religious) believer in Mac or Windows. But that's missing out on a couple of things. Apple makes good (if slightly expensive) hardware, and Vista runs really quite fast on it. If you're a Machead, you might have to run Windows occasionally for work, or you might want to play a few more games than are available on OS X.

Although Boot Camp is intended to run Windows XP SP2 only, the world and his dog has spent time over the past few months trying to get Vista up and running on Boot Camp, with various levels of success. It's been a pretty doable thing for a while now, and I was able to put Vista on my personal dual core MacBook in November with no hassles at all. Out of the box, pretty much everything worked.

Not all of the functionality was there. Using two fingers to scroll using the trackpad, or right click (yes, there's one mouse button, but right clicking by putting a second finger on the trackpad is remarkably intuitive) is something I really missed when mucking around in Vista. Then there's the other things that don't work: sound,  Bluetooth,  keyboard mapping, the disc eject key, brightness adjustments and the like.

Luckily, someone's done all the homework, (thanks, you crazy guy) so it was pretty easy last night to get All of these things up and running, after one hiccup. When unpacking the installation files, you unpack them to the drivers folder the instructions tell you to create on the desktop in Vista. This is a little ambiguous, and had us foxed. So when the drivers installer asks something about a server, and asks you to browse for it, look for the drivers folder you made, and put them there. After that's it's pretty much a walk in the park.