Because You Can …

I’m installing Windows XP on a Mac. Well, a lot of folks are doing that today thanks to BootCamp, but there’s a difference: I own a PowerBook, not a MacIntel. (For the non-technologists, the PowerBook uses a PowerPC processor, not an Intel x86 processor.) I came across a qemu port for Mac OS X named Q that emulates an x86 very, very, slowly. So I’m installing Windows, well, because you can.

Apart from the performance, the other thing that’s been bothering me is Microsoft’s counter: there’s a little counter by the side which has been saying “Setup will complete in approximately 23 minutes” for the last couple of hours. I mean, if you’re gonna put a counter there, shouldn’t it accurately reflect the time remaining, based on the speed of the processor you’re running on? Right now, it seems to me like the timestamps have been hardcoded, and even if it takes days to install, it will still maintain a cheery-faced “23 minutes to completion.”