BootChamp For Mac

BootChamp is a small Mac OS X utility designed for OS X users that also have Windows partitions on their Mac. The status bar menulet tries to simplify the procedure that needs to be followed to switch to the Windows installation.

Traditionally, if you have both OS X and Windows partitions installed on your Mac, you can switch between them by holding down the Option key when you power up your Mac, until you are able to see all available partitions, and then select the one you want to boot.

If you are already running the OS X installation, you can open the System Preferences window and change your startup disk from there: the change will be applied to every startup, until you manually change the drive again.

BootChamp eliminates the need to go through these procedures: upon launch, the app places a small menulet in your status bar where you can quickly choose to restart the computer, booting on the Windows partition. On first run you will have to provide the administrator password, but this is a one time request.

BootChamp does not modify the settings for the original startup disk: the next time you restart your Mac, regardless of your current operating system, the computer will boot using the default partition.

The BootChamp status bar app is a great tool to have around if you do not want to waste time when trying to reboot your Mac using the Windows partition: the app makes the entire process as simple as possible.

The utility does not have any customization options, but comes with built-in documentation that shows you how to change the default status bar icon via the command line. The same document lists all the items that need to be removed to completely uninstall the app from your system.