While visiting my most favorite forum in the whole wide world today, I was greeted by the best news I’ve had in weeks: Intel-based Macs can now boot Windows officially! No more hacks, no more work arounds and no more jumping through hoops. All a Mac user needs to do is download Apple’s Boot Camp.

This sure is a real welcome news for me because my iBook is due for a replacement and I was actually contemplating on getting a Windows laptop because I need it to do my job. Using my iBook in a “Microsoftified” company is a big job for me because I have to make a lot of adjustments to make things work. Being a systems administrator helped a lot because all the settings that I need to make my Mac work in my network can be done by me. However, accessing Windows-only applications can be a real pain because I had to connect my iBook to my Desktop Windows PC using Remote Desktop Controller to do it.

With Apple’s Boot Camp, I can do this natively — well not immediately because my current iBook still has a PPC CPU (not the Intel CPU the newer Macs have) but I can be assured that even if my next computer will still be an Apple, my problem of connecting to Windows-centric networks will be a thing of the past. But this is not the only good news, the *real* good news is that the functionality of Boot Camp will be built-in to the next iteration of OS X (Leopard)!