Camp
What is selling Apple laptops to a lot of people nowadays is the ability to install Windows as well as OS X on there. Not via Parallels either, I mean actually natively installing the operating system and using the drivers for the hardware that Apple provide. But if you do have Parallels, you can then boot into your Windows partition from within OS X, allowing you the best of both worlds. It’s there as a full reboot option when you want to play some games, but it’s there without a restart if you need to just do something quickly.
So I bought a legitimate OEM copy of Windows along with my laptop so I could do just that. I went through the Boot Camp process, got it all installed and activated my copy. It’s a little odd seeing the XP boot screen appearing on a Mac Book, but once it’s started up it’s everything you expect from Windows. Viruses and all.
So then I went into OS X and told Parallels to boot into it, which it did, but then Windows popped up the activation window again. Since it now thinks it’s running on the fake Parallels hardware, it thinks I’m a filthy pirate who has just installed it on a second machine. And in a few days, if I don’t activate it (which I can’t, because it thinks it’s already been) it’ll not let me start it anymore. I can still restart and boot into it properly, but it refuses to work under Parallels because of Microsoft’s retarded activation scheme.
This is the problem with DRM schemes. If I really wanted to, I could get around the activation issue with a hack, there are no shortage of pirated copies of XP out there for download. But as a legitimate customer I’m being stopped from running my own copy of XP on my own hardware (and the same physical machine remember). DRM doesn’t stop the real pirate, it just makes it harder for the customer who is just trying to use what they paid for.
