Apple yet to upgrade Boot Camp for Windows 7

Apple has committed to upgrading its Boot Camp application to support Windows 7, but it is unlikely such an upgrade will be available until the hype around Microsoft's latest OS until has died down.

Boot Camp is a utility that lets users run Windows and its applications from a separate disk partition on an Intel-based Mac. It allows Mac users to run either operating system, but it reportedly slows down Windows 7 considerably. Apple has said it will need to upgrade Boot Camp before Windows 7 will work well on it.

According to Apple's support site, the company promises to support all versions of Microsoft's Windows 7 - Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate - with Boot Camp in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but it does not provide a target date for the upgrade, saying instead that it will be out "before the end of the year."

The company lists nine older Imac, MacBook Pro and Mac Pro models that will not be able to run Windows 7 under Boot Camp. Although all the machines have Intel processors, Apple did not elaborate on why it will not support Microsoft's new operating system on them.

The four MacBook Pros include 15-inch and 17-inch notebooks from 2006, and a Mac Pro workstation powered by an Intel Xeon dual-core running at 2.66GHz or 3GHz.

Windows 7 is said to be compatible with many ageing PCs that were running Windows XP and netbooks that run stripped down Linux.

Both Snow Leopard and the Windows 7 RC (release candidate) have been available for several months.