Tags: Apple, Microsoft

Microsoft Vista will not support EFI in initial phase

This is sad news for those people who were hoping to run the upcoming Windows Vista operating system on their recently acquired Intel powered Macintosh machines. Microsoft has stated that they would not be able to ship the Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) technology in the initial versions of Vista.

This makes it a very tough process for anyone who is aiming to install the Vista OS on Mac hardware. In fact, an Apple engineer has also stated that Intel Macs are unlikely to be able to run Windows Vista. Both these operating systems use different booting mechanism, which would complicate the process of dual booting Vista and Mac OS X together.

Another possible issue is the fact that Microsoft is only expected to support EFI in their 64-bit versions of Vista and all the Intel powered Macs out till now are using 32-bit chips. Apple has also not included much of the legacy code of the older technologies in their hardware which would further complicate the installation of Vista (without EFI) on Mac powered by Intel technology.

However, the iPod maker continues to claim that it will not stop Mac owners from running, or trying to run Windows on their Macs.