Given the presence of a long weekend and Polly being tird up with work for the majority of it I was left with little choice but to give in to the little demons egging me on and install BootCamp on my MacBook Pro.

This was silly for a couple of reasons. Firstly, BootCamp is beta. And even in these crazy times when beta means everything from 'may open a portal to dimensions best unspecified' to 'a product by Google' one should still be wary of any beta product that plays with your partition map. Secondly, DiskWarrior hasn't been ported to the Intel macs as yet, leaving you in the uncertain hands of fsck-hfs should the worst happen. And lastly, I've got a purpose built games PC sitting right under the laptop - so why bother?

But geekdom got the better of me. And so I ran up BootCamp, partitioned my harddisc and rebooted back into MacOS while I burnt a slipstreamed XP SP2 disc on the games box. Well, that was the plan.

It probably doesn't need stating at this point that it didn't work out. MacOS didn't boot due to an extent problem on the drive. Disk Utility refused to touch it, fsck wouldn't do a damn thing and so I ended up mounting it via FireWire on the PowerBook, pulling off my data and reinstalling MacOS while watching Top Gear.

The good news is that now it's all working, with dual-boot WinXP and MacOS. The downside is it's still a bit raw - hacks are needed for the right click on the laptop, a few nicities don't work and the keyboard mapping is bollocksed. But at least I can play Civ IV on the go now...