The rivalry between Mac vs PC rages on and the fan bases of both sides can be quite the passionate group, but there is a substantial subset of Mac users who choose to run Windows on a Mac via Apple’s bundled Bootcamp utility.

When Windows 8 was released back in October a lot of people installed or upgraded to the new OS on both their Macs and PCs. Microsoft also offered a very compelling offer to allow user to upgrade to Windows 8 for $40 which was the cheapest upgrade they have ever offered. This upgrade offer combined with the new features that Windows 8 offered was a compelling reason for many people to upgrade.

Not so fast there!

The only problem was that Apple had not yet released support for Windows 8 in its Bootcamp application and hey had not released drivers for it’s hardware to make it work with Windows 8. Some users were suspicious about the amount of time Apple took to offer this support considering Microsoft offered a consumer preview of Windows 8 months before the official release date, but rumors aside, the result was that users who upgraded to Windows 8 on their Macs had a lot of hardware trouble. For example, I have a Macbook Pro here in the office and I upgraded it to Windows 8, after doing it I was unable to use the trackpad or keyboard on the laptop itself, my only option was to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse. I also had an issue that every time I booted up into the Windows 8 environment my system clock was set about 6 hours ahead of the actual time.

Better late than never?

So onto the good news, yesterday Apple released a new version of Bootcamp (version 5.0.5033 which you can get from here, the update is also a part of the Mountain Lion 10.8.3 update) and now you can run Windows 8 on a Mac without issues.  Many people choose to do this because they prefer the Apple hardware and others do it because there are applications they need to run that are only offered on Windows.

So how do you use Bootcamp on your Mac?

For those who need a guide to using Bootcamp, Apple provide a really good one here.

If you find any issues with this update please let us know in the comments!