Microsoft has been running a campaign for the past few months trying to convince individuals and businesses to stop using the company’s wildly popular, but 10-year-old Windows XP operating system.
On the one hand, you can cynically view this as the company trying to make more money by getting you to pay for an upgrade to a new operating system. On the other hand, Windows 7 includes a slew of security features and other updates that you’ll never see in XP.
So it’s interesting to see that Apple is effectively dropping support for older versions of Windows. For the last few years Apple has offered a tool called Boot Camp on Mac computers that allows you to install Windows alongside OS X and choose which operating system to run each time you boot.
But when Apple launched OS X Lion last month, the company apparently updated Boot Camp so that it only supports Windows 7. If you’re currently using a Mac with Windows XP or Vista installed on Boot Camp you can keep that Boot Camp partition — but you can’t upgrade to the
latest version of Boot Camp. And if you buy a new Mac or upgrade to OS X 10.7 Lion before installing Windows using Boot Camp, you’d best have a Windows 7 installer handy, because Windows XP ain’t going to work.
