In fact, Nederkoorn's planning on keeping the project alive. "There are driver issues right now. There's not a good video driver for Windows XP," he said. "And the Mac crashes when you shut down Windows. People are going to need to talk to each other and share [information]." He hopes to move the dual-boot project to SourceForge, a popular open-source development and download repository.

Although Nederkoorn hasn't heard a whisper from Apple, he doesn't expect to. "I think they may have talked about this internally, but decided not to contact me because they wanted to remain impartial."

But while Apple has been aggressive in blocking efforts to run its Mac OS X on non-Mac hardware, in the past it's said it wouldn't prevent Mac owners from running Windows on their Intel-powered computers.

In fact, the dual-boot process, if streamlined and made usable by the masses, might boost Apple's bottom line. Last week, the investment banking firm Needham & Co. LLC said Apple could sell a million more Macs if the Intel-based systems could run Windows applications as fast as PCs.

"I think this could be a big boom for Apple," Nederkoorn agreed. "On a dual-boot, Windows is directly accessing [Intel's] Core Duo [processor]. I've never had a laptop this fast."

Nederkoorn's solution may be the only available for some time, since Microsoft recently confirmed that Windows Vista -- which some users had hoped would boot on Intel Macs -- won't contain technology that would have made it easier to run Windows applications on Macs.

The ZIP file needed to construct a dual-boot Mac is available from here.