Mindboards

hi,
casually I came upon a book by mattallen ( Matthew Richardson: "Getting started with the Intel Galileo") about the Intel Galileo Board, providing the Arduino Sketch IDE for C/C++

Is anybody around here who has any experience with it? (Both with the board and mattallen's book and/or other additional aspects?

any hints how to make the Galileo work with Windows XP?
How is it possible to program multitasking and IRQ-timer using the Arduino IDE for the Galileo?

(e.g., for Arduino Due (ARM Cortex M3) there are Scheduler and DueTimer available, and all hardware and all IDE software (currently 1.6.5) is run very well by XP)