Open your Applications→Utilities folder. Inside, open the program called Boot Camp Assistant.

Click Continue. You arrive at the Select Tasks screen, where you have three options:

Once those setup tasks are complete—you’ve prepared the flash drive and downloaded the drivers—you’re asked to partition, or subdivide, your hard drive. You’re setting aside a certain amount of space that will hold your copy of Windows and all the PC software you decide to install. This partitioning process doesn’t involve erasing your whole hard drive; all your stuff is perfectly safe. (You can’t install Boot Camp if your hard drive is already partitioned—except for OS X’s own Recovery partition, of course.)

The dialog box offers a Divide Equally button, but it also lets you drag a space-divider handle to divide up your drive space between the Mac and Windows sides (Figure 8-1). Use your experience running Windows on a real PC, if you have one, to decide how big your Windows “hard drive” should be; Apple recommends that for Windows 8 or 8.1, the Windows partition should be at least 30 gigabytes.

Most people choose to dedicate a swath of the main internal hard drive to the Windows partition. But if you have a second internal hard drive, you can also choose one of these options:

On the Start Windows Installation screen, you’re supposed to—hey!—start the Windows installation. Grab your Windows DVD and slip it into the Mac. Its installer goes to work immediately.

Following the “I agree to whatever Microsoft’s lawyers say” screen, Microsoft’s installer asks which partition you want to put Windows on. It’s really important to pick the right one. Play your cards wrong, and you could erase your whole Mac partition.

Choose the one called “Disk 0 Partition 3 BOOTCAMP.” (The number may be different, but it will say “BOOTCAMP.”)

Then click “Drive options (advanced),” click Format, click OK, and finally click Next. Your Windows partition is now formatted (it uses the NTFS formatting scheme, if anybody asks).

Now your Mac looks just like a PC that’s having Windows installed. Be patient; sit around for half an hour as the Windows installer flits about, restarts, does what it has to do.

When it’s all over, a crazy, disorienting sight presents itself: your Mac, running Windows. There’s no trace of the familiar desktop, Dock, or menu; it’s Windows now, baby.

Figure 8-1. How much hard drive space do you want to dedicate to your “PC”? It’s not an idle question; whatever you give Windows is no longer available for your Mac. Drag the vertical handle between the Mac and Windows sides of this diagram.

Walk through the Windows setup screens, creating an account, setting the time, and so on.

At this point, your Mac is actually a true Windows PC. You can install and run Windows programs, utilities, and even games; you’ll discover that they run really fast and well.

But as Windows veterans know, every hardware feature of Windows requires a driver—a piece of software that tells the machine how to communicate with its own monitor, networking card, speakers, and so on. And it probably goes without saying that Windows doesn’t include any drivers for Apple’s hardware components.

That’s why, at this point, you need the FAT32 flash drive you created earlier. It contains all the drivers for the Mac’s graphics card, Ethernet and WiFi networking, audio input and output, built-in camera, brightness and volume keys, key, multitouch trackpad gestures, and Bluetooth transmitter. (It also installs a new Control Panel icon and system-tray pop-up menu, as described later in this chapter.)

When you insert this disc or flash drive, the drivers installer opens and begins work automatically. (If it doesn’t, double-click the setup.exe file in the WindowsSupport or Boot Camp folder.)

Figure 8-2. Top: To choose your preferred operating system—the one that starts up automatically unless you intervene—choose →System Preferences. Click Startup Disk, and then click the icon for either OS X or Windows. Next, either click Restart (if you want to switch right now) or close the panel. The identical controls are available when you’re running Windows, thanks to the new Boot Camp Control Panel. Middle: To open the Boot Camp control panel, choose its name from its icon in the Windows system tray. Bottom: This display, known as the Startup Manager, appears when you press Option during startup. It displays all the disk icons, or disk partitions, that contain bootable operating systems. Just click the name of the partition you want, and then click the Continue arrow.

Click past the Welcome and License Agreement screens, and then click Install. You’ll see a lot of dialog boxes come and go; just leave it alone. Don’t click any Cancel buttons. If you get a complaint that the software hasn’t passed Windows Logo testing, click Continue Anyway.

When it’s all over, a dialog box asks you to restart the computer; click Restart. When the machine comes to, it’s a much more functional Windows Mac. (And it has an online Boot Camp Help window waiting for you on the screen.)

From now on, your main interaction with Boot Camp will be telling it what kind of computer you want your Mac to be today: a Windows machine or a Mac.

Presumably, though, you’ll prefer one operating system most of the time. Figure 8-2 (top and middle) shows how you specify your favorite.

From now on, each time you turn on the Mac, it starts up in the operating system you’ve selected.

If you ever need to switch—when you need Windows just for one quick job, for example—press the Option key as the Mac is starting up. You’ll see something like the icons shown in Figure 8-2 (bottom).

Now, if you really want to learn about Windows, you need Windows 7: The Missing Manual or Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual.

But suggesting that you go buy another book would be tacky. So here’s just enough to get by.

First of all, a Mac keyboard and a Windows keyboard aren’t the same. Each has keys that would strike the other as extremely goofy. Still, you can trigger almost any keystroke Windows is expecting by substituting special Apple keystrokes, like this:

The keyboard shortcuts in your programs are mostly the same as on the Mac, but you have to substitute the Ctrl key for the ⌘ key. So in Windows programs, Copy, Save, and Print are Ctrl-C, Ctrl-S, and Ctrl-P.

Similarly, the Alt key is the Windows equivalent of the Option key.

If you really want to understand how your Mac keyboard corresponds to your old PC keyboard, don’t miss Apple’s thrilling document on the subject at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1167.

When you’ve started up in one operating system, it’s easy to access documents that “belong” to the other one. For example:

Figure 8-3. The strangest sight you ever did see: OS X and Windows. On the same screen. At the same time. Courtesy of VMware Fusion. Parallels is very similar.