A student of mine bought a Mac Mini, and asked for my help installing Windows XP via Boot Camp. Glad to help a new Mac user, I agreed–and was surprised at how easy it was.

When I had heard that Boot Camp would need to partition the disk to allow space for XP, I naturally assumed that the entire hard drive would have to be wiped and that both the Mac and Windows OS would have to be installed from the start. This comes from my history of formatting disks, which (and perhaps I was in error in assuming this) I could swear required blanking the whole disk first. Apparently, hard disks can be repartitioned on the fly today; you don’t have to wipe the drive or re-install the Mac OS.

In fact, the entire process was painless, save of course for the tedium of the Windows installation. Not only does it take longer than a Mac OS install, but it requires intervention at various times in the process, so you have to stick around and watch the screen, else risk having it stay at 33-minutes-to-go while it waits for you to enter the registration code, while you are somewhere else believing that the process is ongoing. The Mac OS install, last time I checked, required no such intervention. Just let it go.

The process is pretty easy: create a CD with drivers for Windows; decide how much disk space to dedicate to XP; install XP; then install the Mac drivers from the CD you made. And you’re done.

Simple. Like most stuff with the Mac. It reminds me of conversations I’ve had with people about printers lately. By chance, I have had discussions with different people using Windows, and the difficulties they have had with their printers. A few can’t get their printers to work with Vista. One risks losing the ability to print every time she disconnects the USB cable. And so on.

A student who recently bought a Macbook came to me for their Mac starter lecture, and I wanted to show them how easy it would be to create a driver. In my experience, you had to open the Print system preference, click the “+” button, select the printer from the list, make sure the driver selection was right, and then click “Add.” At that, it’s dead easy.

But his Mac surprised me. All I had to do was plug in my Canon i560, and viola–it appeared in his printer list without his having to lift a finger. We didn’t even have to open the System Preferences–it was just there. Plug it in and it works. My student with the Mac Mini got the same thing. Easier than dead easy. The same kind of thing happened to me when I wanted to print using the school’s Fuji-Xerox color photocopier. I’m not talking about a standard printer, I’m talking about a full-fledged, honking-big office copy machine. Our guy in the office told me that I would need a special driver from the company; certainly a Windows machine would need that. But all I needed was to plug in my Mac, open the Print pref pane, look for the printer on the IP network, and seconds later I was printing in color.

I should probably take the opportunity here to mention a pitfall in my constant crooning about Macs: they do suffer from problems. I get the feeling that people who listen to me and switch to Macs (more and more people do so at my school) get the impression that there is never any difficulty, that you never encounter problems. Of course, that’s not the case.

But most of the time, it’s so damned easy to work with that it’s easy to forget that.