You have to pick one or the other, youd be pretty mad, right Forgive the analogy, I just ate pizza.

The Mac versus PC debate has gotten so ridiculous that even normal, sane people who wouldnt care one way or another are now hurling insults and tsk-tsking at family members and co-workers who have either fallen into the fruity Mac OS camp or the stodgy Windows world.

Over the weekend, I installed Windows 7 RC, a free, preview version of Microsofts forthcoming operating system, the successor to Windows Vista.

Best of all, it works perfectly well on newer Macs sporting Intel processors.

My Macbook, which is two years old, runs it like a champ as a Boot Camp partition.

I never thought Id say this about a Windows operating system again after refusing to upgrade from Windows XP, but from what Ive seen so far, Windows 7 is.

Youre going to lose about 15-25, at least, to run Windows 7, so leave yourself plenty of space for Mac OS, too.

Go to this Microsoft page and sign up for the Windows 7 Release Candidate Customer Preview Program.

Microsoft will send you a unique activation code youll need later.

Its a big download, more than two gigabytes, so youll be waiting a little while.

Iso File To

Burn the.iso file to a DVD to create a Windows 7 install disk.

You can do this easily with OS Xs Disk Utility.

More detailed instructions here ).

This will walk you through the process of creating a partition on your hard drive for Windows 7.

Manual If You

Print out the manual if you want to (it does contain some good, useful info, but its about 26 pages).

Youll be asked, once Windows is installed, to enter your activation code.

This will enable sound, your iSight camera and other hardware from your machine.

Dont like it When youre back in OS X (see below), you can use Boot Camp Utility to delete the Windows partition and reclaim your hard drive space.

Thats it. You have a working copy of Windows 7, which will continue to function normally until March 1, 2010.

If you want to switch back to OS X, youll need to go into Control Panel and look for Boot Camp in order to tell the machine to restart in Mac mode.

Once youre back in OS X, youll have to do the same thing (in System Preferences) to go back to Windows 7.

Software like Parallels and VMWare Fusion allows you to run Windows programs while in Mac OS, too.

Windows 7 Download Mac