这一步，对于经常折腾硬盘的朋友并不陌生 。如果你对fdisk命令很熟悉，那么用Windows 98的启动软盘启动电脑执行fdisk命令将第一个分区活动；如果没有软驱可以使用光驱。如果使用过其他的硬盘操作软件就更好，想办法启动电脑，执行该软件设置OS X所在分区为活动即可。

相关工具：
1、Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) (http://ubcd.sourceforge.net) 可启动光盘
2、Acronis Disk Director (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/) 分区操作软件

FDISK程序的命令行格式通用语法为：FDISK /参数开关，下面是它们的具体功能说明：

　　/ACTOK
　　参数功能：不检查磁盘表面是否有坏扇区。它可以在硬盘分区时不检测磁盘表面是否有坏区，直接进行分区。

　　/CMBR
　　参数功能：重新建立指定磁盘的主引导记录功能说明。其操作等同于/MBR参数，不同之处是可以指定磁盘。

　　/EXT
　　参数功能：在当前磁盘上建立扩展分区（用来随后建立逻辑磁盘分区）。

　　/FPRMT
　　参数功能：在交互模式下询问FAT16或FAT32的使用。当加上/FPRMT参数时不会出现是否支持大容量硬盘的询问画面，而是在每次建立一个新的分区时询问使用FAT16还是FAT32格式，这样我们就可以更自由地划分每一个盘的格式，当然现在不是很实用了。

　　/LOG
　　参数功能：建立磁盘逻辑分区，用/LOG来建立逻辑磁盘，/LOG必须和/EXT同时使用。

　　/LOGO
　　参数功能：使用FAT16格式建立磁盘逻辑分区。

　　/MBR
　　参数功能：重新建立主磁盘的主引导记录（Master Boot Record）。卸载WindowsNT或Windows2000后消除在主引导记录上记载的系统启动选择；当有病毒感染主引导记录时，用来清除病毒相当有效。

　　/PRI
　　参数功能：在磁盘上建立主分区，分区会自动被设定为激活形式。

　　/PRIO
　　参数功能：使用FAT16格式建立主分区并设定为激活形式。

　　/Q
　　参数功能：使用/Q参数将不用在改变分区表后重新启动计算机，这也是一项比较实用的功能，如果大家还需要在运行FDISK之后运行别的软件，记住用这个参数。

　　/STATUS
　　参数功能：当磁盘扩展分区上没有进行逻辑分区时，扩展分区不会被显示出来。

　　/X
　　参数功能：使用/X参数将不会产生带有LBA属性的分区。

　　这些参数中又以/ACTOK，/MBR，/Q 这几个最常用和实用。总的来讲，这些参数会让FDISK程序更全面，但是这些隐藏参数的危险系数也很大，诸位还是要谨慎使用。



=====================================
Well lo and behold it works. After several screwups on my behalf (and not ones that will affect anyone reading this guide), I finally discovered a way to dual boot OSx86 and Windows (any version based on NT) on the same hard drive without the need for GRUB, or LILO, or any UNIX/Linux bootloaders of any kind whatsoever.

You'll only have to type one command at the Command Prompt to accomplish this - seriously. That's part of why I consider it the "simple" method. The hardcore command line crowd would call it the "noob" or "n00b" method, so be it.
If you desire to dual boot with two physical hard drives, an OS on each, try the other dual booting guide - mine is for ending up with both OSx86 and Windows on the same drive HOWEVER the process requires a second hard drive to complete. Once the installation is over you don't need the second hard drive anymore for dual booting; both OSes will be on the one boot drive.

EDIT: Please read that paragraph again, the one you just read. This entire procedure requires two hard drives - or a dual layer DVD burner to store the 6GB .img file on - for this to work. If you do not have two hard drives or a dual layer DVD burner you won't get far. Sorry for the mixup.

While I call this the "Simple Dual Boot" method, I'll get pretty wordy here. My suggestion at the moment would be to print this out for reference because it's kinda long and detailed.

In the most totally simplistic format this process is this:

1) Download the necessary files and extract the files 2) Install the secondary hard drive 3) Download dd and extract the files 4) Use dd to write the image to the secondary drive 5) Boot the computer running OSx86 natively 6) Install Windows onto the remaining drivespace 7) Set the Darwin/OSx86 partition Active 8) Enjoy your dual booting OSx86/Windows single drive PC

That's it, in a nutshell.

I prefer to overexplain things so I know you've got all the possible information you need to accomplish the task and reach the goal. I don't want people coming to me saying "You didn't tell me this or that and it hosed my system." I'm trying to help here, so read it all and then take your best shot - if you follow my instructions you'll be dual booting OSx86 and Windows off the same drive in a short period of time.

DISCLAIMER 1: You can seriously screw up your computer with the following information if you do not proceed with caution or you've never attempted this procedure before. I take no responsibility for you hosing your entire hard drive and losing years of data, porn, pictures, movies, mp3 files, music, drawings, etc. Whatever you have on the hard drive you want to put OSx86 on needs to be totally empty before you begin this process. If you're not interested in doing this, take a hike.
DISCLAIMER 2: How you got OSx86 is not my concern nor anything I care to hear about; you won't find links to torrents, FTP sites, HTTP sites, etc on this page. What you're doing with it is not my concern either. Good luck to you in your efforts.

Getting Started

First off you'll need a few things:

- The VMWare tiger-x86.img file for OSx86 for Intel (see above disclaimer). The actual file people are "acquiring" from the Internet is a 1.3GB xxxxx-xxx.tar.bz2 compressed file that contains the necessary VMWare virtual machine files and that .img file. Once the tar.bz2 is extracted the tiger-x86.img file becomes a 6GB single file. If your hard drives are formatted with FAT32 you're out of luck since FAT32 has a 4GB filesize limit. Remember this before you decide to extract the tar.bz2 file or you'll end up wasting time - decompressing the bz2 file is pretty slow even on the fastest machines.

- A Windows NT-based OS such as Windows 2000, Windows XP Home or Pro or Windows Server 2003. The idea here is to install Windows nice and clean in a totally new fresh installation alongside of OSx86 sharing the same hard drive in a dual booting configuration. If you're not prepared to do this, once again, you're on your own.

- A piece of software to set a partition Active. There are several available to use, from the simplest one of all, fdisk (found on Windows 9x boot floppies - get one at http://www.bootdisk.com if you don't have one) to more complex tools like Acronis Partition Expert, Powerquest Partition Magic, or any other program that has the ability to mark/set a specific partition as Active. Whatever software you choose to use needs to be used from a bootable floppy disk or a bootable CD; you can't do the changes required to the partition table and MBR inside of Windows or inside of OSx86 once it's functional.

- The program to write the VMWare binary image directly to the hard drive you want to install OSx86 on is called dd and you can get it here: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/rawwrite/dd.htm Yes I'm well aware that the hardcore UNIX/Linux crowd frowns upon using such a tool inside Windows but really it's the simplest way to do this raw write to the hard drive that currently exists and has been widely reported to work.

Last but not least, you need a second hard drive outside of your primary drive to make this happen. I'm still working on a possible single drive workaround but currently it's just not possible if you're using dd to write the .img file. The .img file is a binary hard drive image; it contains complete a complete MBR (Master Boot Record) and partition table so when that .img file is applied to a hard drive, anything on it will be destroyed in the process. It's not possible to just say "Oh I only want to create a 6GB partition for this and the rest will be ok" because when you reboot you'll be very pissed to learn you just lost everything on the drive - but of course you'll have a 6GB bootable OSx86 partition left over.
(Just as a sidenote, if you have a single hard drive in your system and you have a dual layer DVD burner you can do this procedure by burning the 6GB .img file to a dual layer DVD and then booting the PC off something that can access dd and do the deed, perhaps some LiveCD from a Linux distro but I simply can not and will not go into that procedure at this time in this guide).

Please bear in mind this guide isn't tailored to new computer users. If you don't know a FAT from an MBR, or NTFS from HFS, you're probably going to encounter some problems. Please refer back to DISCLAIMER 1 before proceeding any further.

Now on with the show... good luck
Step 1 -- Acquire the VMWare files and extract them

Once you have acquired the VMWare tar.bz2 file you'll need to extract it. As said above, you must be using NTFS as the file system on the drive or partition where you plan to extract this archive to. Even though it's a 1.3GB tar.bz2 file, once it's uncompressed it's going to become a 6GB tar file. Inside that tar file (Tape ARchive, originally created for UNIX machines, a way of storing data sequentially in a package without compression) are several very tiny files needed by VMWare to actually use the 5.99GB .img file as a virtual hard drive. We don't need the tiny configuration files but they're worth keeping around once you extract them, but our primary target is getting that tiger-x86.img file out of the archive.

You can use several different utilities to extract the tar.bz2 contents to your hard drive. The most popular Windows-based application would probably be WinRAR (http://www.rarsoft.com/download.html)
Download it, install it, then find the 1.3GB tar.bz2 file and use WinRAR to extract the contents to a location of your choosing on your hard drive. When it's done with the first stage (decompressing the bz2 file) you'll have the tar file left over - it's 6GB and you'll need to use WinRAR on that file to simply pull the files out. So you're looking at a lot of hard drive space being used up pretty fast - the 1.3GB for the original download file, the 6GB for the tar file, and now another 6GB to extract the tar. Almost 15GB of drive space so far and we haven't even really begun.
Sidenote: There are bad/corrupt copies of the tar.bz2 file floating around on the Internet. If you go through the time and trouble to download the 1.3GB file and you get errors from WinRAR about "The file is corrupted" well... sorry to say this but you're out of luck. There are some copies floating around that have corrupted tar headers and so far I nor anyone else hasn't found a fix for this. I even tried a tar repair utility - it worked on the file for over 6 hours and in the end it was still pooched. So be prepared that the file you grab may not work at all. Just letting you know in advance.

So once you have the actual contents of the tar.bz2 file finally extracted to your hard drive you'll have 11 files total but again we're only interested in the one single tiger-x86.img file and it checks in at 5.99GB in size.

When that file is extracted, move it to a root partition just to make things easier on yourself. Move it to C: or D: or whatever, but make sure the root is on the first hard drive and not the one you just installed or you'll end up having a problem. We'll use C: as the example location from now on; just change the necessary dd switches if necessary.

Moving on...

Step 2 - Connect the secondary hard drive and verify it's functional

If you have already attached the second hard drive, skip to Step 3. If you haven't done so already, you need to attach/connect the hard drive that you are planning to install OSx86 on.Turn off the PC, attach the drive paying attention to drive jumpers and such. Boot the PC, verify the BIOS sees the drive then let it load up Windows and make sure Windows can see it. You should get a balloon popup about new hardware being found and after a few moments Windows will probably tell you you'll need to reboot to have it work. Don't argue with Windows or me, just reboot and be done with it. It's 30-60 seconds for most people and you'll be moving on quick enough.

Once you reboot and get back into Windows, run Explorer (Windows + E is the fastest method, the keys on the keyboard) and look at that drive you just attached. I have no idea what drive letter Windows may or may not assign, I have no idea if that drive is even partitioned or formatted. The purpose of this sub-step is just to verify that Explorer/Windows can see it.

If you have only two physical hard drives in your PC now (your primary physical drive and the one you just installed), this next step becomes pretty simple because dd is going to wipe that drive clean totally. We don't need to do any partitioning actions, nor formats, nothing at all. So if you've confirmed the second drive is connecting and operating we move to...

Step 3 - Download dd and extract it to the same location as the .img file

Download dd. It's just a tiny Zip file containing three files. Once it's downloaded extract the contents to C: (or wherever you have the tiger-x86.img file stored). After it's extracted we move to...

Step 4 - Write the .img file to the secondary hard drive using dd

Go to Start - Run and execute the command:

cmdYou'll need to cd (change directory) to the directory where dd and the tiger-x86.img files are stored. If you followed my suggestions, that's the C: root directory, so type c: then press Enter and you're there.

Once you in the same directory as dd and the .img file, here is the command you need to run. This is the one single command line you have to enter and no other - seriously. But there's a catch before you enter this command. You have to verify which drive we're going to write the .img file.

How do we do this? Easy. Go back to Start - Run again (you can leave the Command Prompt open, don't close it yet. Start - Run - and type:

diskmgmt.mscThat brings up the Disk Management console in Windows XP (I'm assuming you're running XP in this guide - Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 work the same way, of course). Here's a link to a a pic similar to what you should see when Disk Management is running:

Disk Management example (http://members.cox.net/br0adband/diskmgmt.png)

I have one physical hard drive in my Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop, that's what the Disk 0 signifies in the lower section with the graph bars. There are three partitions on that single drive: the 6GB Healty one (that's you-know-what); Windows XP labeled C: and the rest as D:.

The information we need is Disk X where X is the number of the drive as listed in Disk Management. If you have two drives in your PC, Disk 0 for you should be the one you're running XP off (or whatever Windows NT-based OS you're running); Disk 1 would be a second physical hard drive; Disk 2 would be the third, and so on. Get it?

EDIT: It was just brought to my attention that if you have one or more SATA drives in your PC then things in the next paragraph might be a bit different for you, however my information is still accurate. What you are looking for as the target drive is whichever hard disk you intend to put OSx86 on. Doesn't matter if it's SATA or IDE or whatever. Disk Management is still going to identify that drive with a specific Disk X number and the X is what you need to use when doing the dd command in the next few paragraphs. Thanks go out to HoZy for the quick heads up on that little booboo I made.

Ok, so I'm going on the assumption that you have two drives, Disk 0 and Disk 1. Disk 0 is where the .img file is stored, and our goal in this step is to write that .img file to Disk 1. Sooooo... here's that all important single command you have to type:

dd bs=1M if=tiger-x86.img of=.PhysicalDriveXwhere X is (I repeat things a lot don't I?) the drive you're planning to write the .img file to and use for booting OSx86. "Are we clear?" comes to mind from the movie A Few Good Men because it's important to grasp this. For me the command was:

dd bs=1M if=tiger-x86.img of=.PhysicalDrive1and that was it. The bs parameter has something to do with the bytes per block that is being written. The standard setting of 1M means 1048576 bytes per block, meaning 1 megabyte blocks. I did the command without that bs switch one time and it took 55 minutes to write the 6GB .img file. I went back and did it again with the bs=1M switch and the writing took 5.5 minutes - big difference.

if= means the (i)nput (f)ilename, so we use the name of the tiger-x86.img file. of= means (o)utput (f)ile or the target we're writing to. Since we're not writing a file but a binary image to the hard drive, we're specifying the location as discussed above, .PhysicalDriveX where X matches Disk X from Disk Management.

Simple.

Once the image writing is done dd will give you some input/output data that's not really important. As long as it completes and goes back to a prompt (like C:) without errors you're done with step 4. So now on to...

Step 5 - Boot the computer from that drive and load OSx86 natively

After the image writing is complete, the basic gist of this step is to shut down the computer, take the secondary drive and remove it from the computer. Take the primary drive (your original drive that has Windows on it, the one you don't want to ruin) and disconnect that primary drive from the computer absolutely and totally meaning it's not connected by any cables. It's not necessary to remove the drive physically from the computer, just make sure you unplug the IDE/SATA cable and the power cable if there is one from the rear of the primary drive. In the end we want the drive in the machine (if necessary) but not connected. Got it?

Take the secondary drive and verify the jumpers are set (for IDE drives, of course) so the computer can boot from that drive and attach it to the cables that you used for the primary drive. What we're doing is just swapping drives really, but it's really essential to ensure the primary one (the important drive with all your stuff) simply isn't part of this anymore.

Get the drive installed and double check the cables, etc just in case you might have jarred something loose. One guy in the IRC channel did that a few days ago, we all just laughed about it being a rookie error that every person that's ever worked on PC's has made. If you're sure it's ok, hit the power button and let 'er rip.

You should see the POST test that all PCs go through or you might see the brand logo from the manufacturer of the PC or motherboard (like a Dell logo, or maybe HP or IBM, possible Asus/Abit/etc). After a few moments if all things are going smoothly you'll see the Darwin boot loader appear. You don't have to do anything at all at this point, just leave it be and after 8 seconds it disappears and voila, you *should* see the familiar grey bootscreen with the lighter shade Apple logo in the center.

Congrats at this point, you're loading OSx86 natively. If no errors happen, it should load into the next stage soon enough, the bluish colorful screen and then to the "Loading Mac OS" screen. After that if everything is still ok, you'll be looking at the OSX desktop: the Dock below, a drive icon or two on the right side of the screen, the taskbar at the top with the Apple "start button" on the left side and the clock and some icons on the right.

That's as far as I'm going to go with the booting OSx86 part because it'll either work or it won't. If it works, congrats; if it doesn't then perhaps OSx86 just doesn't like your hardware or some other reason.

This guide isn't meant to teach you everything about OSx86 nor even begin to try to solve the near infinite number of things that can go wrong at this point because of the near infinite variety of PC hardware.

It works or it doesn't, so good luck.

Moving on...

Step 6 - Installing Windows on the remaining drivespace

At this point, if OSx86 is up and running for you, play around with it for awhile, kick the tires so to speak. Unless you're running a PC with a processor that supports SSE3 instructions (meaning pretty high end top-of-the-line Intel and AMD processors), you won't be able to run iTunes. That's the only application that comes with this particular "release" of OSx86 that will not run on SSE2 processors (older P4's, Celerons, AthlonXPs, etc). Work is in progress on "fixing" this in the future so stay tuned to osx86project.org for updates.

When you're ready to add Windows to the mix, come back to this guide. I'll be here waiting.
br0adband waits... shuffles his feet... twiddles his thumbs... whistles... looks around...
Oh, you're back. Cool, let's get to work.

Break out your Windows install CD and pop it into the CD/DVD drive. Choose to either Restart the computer or Shutdown so you can boot off the Windows CD and begin the installation process - we can't do the installation from inside OSx86, it has to be done by booting from the Windows CD... but you already knew that, right?

After the PC boots and Windows does it's normal intitial file copy process you'll reach the point of choosing your action. Choose to install Windows, then it'll ask you to agree to the EULA (you really should read that sometime, people). Press F8 to Accept it and on the next screen you'll see some partition information. ONE of those partitions listed is the OSx86 partition you just created and installed OSx86 to so this point is CRITICAL to be careful with or you'll end up pooching the entire drive and you'll have to go back to step 1 and start over. So pay attention.

You'll want to choose the empty space/unallocated space to create a partition for Windows to be installed on. If you go back to that link I posted above showing my Disk Management layout, you'll see the 6GB at the very beginning of the drive for you-know-what, then 10GB of space allocated for Windows XP, then the rest for just storage space for any use.

So, at this point you need to choose either a smaller sized partition just for the OS and the rest of the drivespace for storage, or use all the remaining available drivespace for Windows. Make your choice and follow the instructions on the screen very carefully or you'll end up making a mistake. You have to read carefully, please, I can't stress that enough.

When you get to this stage, Windows is going to complain about another OS on the first area of the hard drive and how it's not possible to have two partitions marked as Active. The Active partition is the only one that is bootable, so when Windows is installed it sets the Windows system partition as bootable - and by doing so the Darwin/OSx86 partition then becomes unbootable and why step 7 exists. So just tell Windows that you know all this and you'll fix it yourself by clicking OK on any warnings it tries to give you.

Once you choose what you want to do - if you decide to create a smaller system partition for Windows, you can also create the partition for the remaining drivespace by following the instructions - you then move on to the formatting screen. Just choose Quick Format NTFS, it's less hassle in the long run and definitely faster than a normal format. To Windows, a Quick Format and a Normal Format have the same functionality but obviously the quick one is... well... quicker. 'Nuff said.

After that more file copying takes place then it'll reboot the PC. Leave the CD in the drive and let the process continue. Windows will go through a GUI installation and at various stages it'll ask you questions - but you already know this stuff, right? We're all PC experts around here. :P

Let the installation finish and when it's done totally the computer will reboot the final time after which it's going to boot right back into Windows.

"But but but what about OSx86? Did I lose it?" you're probably asking. Nope, it's there, at the beginning of the hard drive, consuming the same 6GB it has since you wrote the .img file to that drive. The problem is this: the Windows bootloader overwrote the Darwin bootloader and changed the MBR of the hard drive to think the Windows partition is the Active one - sorta. We're about to fix that little oversight in...

Step 7 - Set the Darwin/OSx86 partition Active

2 steps to go, we're almost home kids.

This is the point where we need to choose how you want to set the Darwin/OSx86 partition to Active. I won't go into extreme details here about partitioning technology and such, suffice to say it's a pretty simple procedure. The end result is having the computer boot

The simplest possible way to do this is to use a 98SE boot floppy to boot the computer (you remember floppies, right?) or a 98SE install CD and run fdisk and then change the Active partition from the Windows one to the Darwin/OSx86 one.

I haven't used fdisk in a long long time so forgive me for not remembering the specific commands. In this day and age the better solution seems to be using a bootable CD with programs or utilities to assist in doing this step. The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) (http://ubcd.sourceforge.net) is one such CD but I prefer to use my Acronis Disk Director (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputin...s/diskdirector/) to do partitioning stuff these days. Powerquest (now owned by Symantec) made Partition Magic for years but I'm not sure how Symantec/Norton is going to continue developing it so I'll do this step using the Disk Director. The trial version of Disk Director should allow you to make the bootable CD necessary for this step but I can't verify that at this precise moment.

Once again you can use any tools you think will work for you, you don't have to use Disk Director as I did, this is just my methodology for myself. If you're a Linux person and you have a Knoppix/Ubuntu/SuSe/etc LiveCD available and you know the proper commands to change the Active partition, go for it.

Reboot the PC and put the Disk Director boot CD into the drive fast enough to boot the PC off it - of course your PC can boot from the CD/DVD right? You already made that change in the BIOS right? Right. If you missed it, simply Control+Alt+Del and reboot again with the CD in the drive and you'll get rolling along in a few more seconds.

When Disk Director shows up choose Manual mode and click OK. You'll see a drive layout at the bottom of the screen very similar to Disk Management in Windows. Right click on the 6GB partition at the beginning of the drive, choose Advanced - Set Active. Click OK. Click the 'checkered flag' icon on the top toolbar towards the left side. This action should only take a split second. Once it's done, the checkered flag will dim in color and won't be clickable again.

Congratulations, you just set the Darwin/OSx86 partition to Active. Take the CD out of the CD/DVD drive, click the red X in the upper right hand corner and the computer will reboot right into...

Step 8 - Enjoy your dual booting OSx86/Windows single drive PC

That's it. You're done. Have fun with your spankin' new OSx86/Windows dual booting PC.

I'm on IRC quite a bit but please, after this wiki is published I'm gonna get hit hard by people asking questions.

Everything you need to know (for the most part regarding the really specific details) is right here on this wiki page. I can't help it if your PC doesn't like Darwin or OSx86 or maybe even Windows. I can't help it if your video card doesn't support Quartz and your CPU doesn't support Rosetta and you can't listen to iTunes streams on OSx86. I can't help it if things go wrong, but I can help when it comes to this guide being accurate as far as my own personal experience is concerned, so in that respect I can answer questions.

For those that are interested here are the hardware specs for my machine :

Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop

Mobile Intel Pentium 4-M at 1.7 GHz 400 MHz FSB 512KB L2 Northwood CPU (SSE2 support only)

1GB PC2100 DDR CAS 2 latency

40GB 5400 rpm 2MB cache hard drive

3Com onboard NIC (working in OSx86 natively)

Generic Lucent WinModem (not working in OSx86 but I don't use it anyway)

10x10x8 CD/DVD combo drive (soon to be replaced by a Pioneer slot loading dual layer DVD burner)

ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 16MB video (working in OSx86 but no acceleration)

Microsoft Optical Mouse Blue (not working in OSx86 in USB mode/with USB>PS/2 adapter it does)

Just be a part of this amazing thing that's happening. If you're really nice and you think my guide helped, donate to the site to cover bandwidth costs. No, I'm not that involved and I don't intend to be, but I enjoy helping others.

I hope this information is useful to people for education purposes and experimentation. I'm not condoning software piracy or hardware theft, I'm just someone that loves to tinker around with computers. I've been working on PCs for close to 32 years, having built an Altima homebrew PC in 1975 at the tender age of 7. Worked with Windows since it's inception 20 years ago and never looked back. While I have some UNIX/Linux experience and knowledge, I am lightyears behind most persons these days and I'll admit I'm a solid Windows devotee. Been online since 1978 to boot, boy those were the days moving along at 50 baud on a local bulletin board. But I digress.

I like OSX, what I see in this OSx86 release is promising and I think it's great to see Apple moving in a new direction, but realistically they'll never release it for just any old PC floating around. Apple has neither the time, the budget nor the inclination to support that near infinite variety of PC hardware I keep talking about. It's just not possible for them to do, and most computer hardware manufacturers of today or even tomorrow can't afford to have two in-house staffs to handle such a need: one side to handle primarily Windows based tech support and the other for Apple/OSX stuff.

Good luck and have fun, always...