OS X, Vista, Bootcamp and Virtualization
So very much to blog about, it’s been a very busy few days for me from a tech perspective. I will start with my adventures with running Vista on a Mac and then get to the mobile phone and gadget stuff.
So I joined a team at work. I am a Microsoft Vista Champion. So my new goal is helping promote usage of Windows Vista from a few different perspectives. I expect the "digital lifestyle" angle to be the most common but productivity will probably creep in from time to time. So with that I decided it was time I get Vista running on my Macbook Pro.
My initial idea was to go pick up a 250GB Hard Disk, perform major laptop surgery, Bootcamp Vista with OS X and call it a day. After getting laptop destruction fear, I decided to stick with the 120GB, remove parallels, install it in Bootcamp on a 20GB partition and use VMWare Fusion to share stuff between the two. So here is part one of my adventure…
Kill Me Now…
So, the first was removing my Parallels install, creating a Bootcamp partition and installing Vista. I selected 20GB from the Bootcamp Setup Assistant and off to the races I went, for a minute. That’s when OS X notified me that some files on my machine could not be moved and I had to back up my entire hard disk (over USB no less) wipe the entire thing, restore it, then run the Bootcamp assistant again. Sounds pretty simple, but the entire process took about four hours. After that Vista installed in a snap and I began installing all of the Bootcamp drivers. The installer bombed part of the way through and the trouble began.
Vista was acting really strange. For some reason the video drivers didn’t install properly, and something about the OS was hosed meaning I couldn’t get a Windows Experience Index, so I couldn’t permanently enable Aero. After getting it all set up and ready to go, I booted back into OS X to install VMWare Fusion. The install was painless, an update ran, and I saw something startling. Windows Vista Ultimate was taking up 14GB of my 20GB partition with absolutely no software installed. OUCH! That would never do.
The trouble with that is, there isn’t a way to dynamically resize the partitions. My only option is to remove the Bootcamp, resize it, and reinstall. In hindsight I could have backed it up, deleted it and restored it after I created a new one but with only 120GB to spare, I decided that OS creep could become a huge problem so I decided to just install it in VMWare and run it virtually only.
It’s a Virtual World Baby
Despite not having Aero eye candy, I am quite impressed with VMWare Fusion. I am typing this blog in Windows Vista running in a VMWare Virtual Vista Ultimate environment as we speak. I won’t dive into bench marks, but based on pure perception VMWare is faster. It certainly resumes a paused VM much faster than parallels. It also doesn’t suffer from the "I know your vm is restored but it’s going to stay locked up for a minute or so before you can use it" syndrome that Parallels does.
All in all, it’s up running and working quite well at the moment. It’s a drag that I can’t run Aero or play slick 3d games on it, but I probably wouldn’t do that anyway so it’s ok.
The VM is assigned 2 GB of Ram and seems to perform very well with it. The OS is snappy and I love being able to run it full screen on a spaces pane. That works exceptionally well. I am looking forward to getting my new office set up and I can visualize a 20" iMac with a 20" Cinema display running OS X on one screen and Vista on the other.
I will add a category for Vista Champs, stay tuned as I dive deeper into it and try to provide the best tips on getting the most out of Vista, even if you use a Mac :)
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Comments
Jason, I’ve set up the same environment as you have described above.
MacBook Pro - new, 20GB environment, vmware fusion. i assigned 1GB memory to the virtual machine.
I’m finding that the vista vm is progressively slower. Both the Mac OS (leopard) and the Vista OS are completely up to date. I’ve installed MS Office on the vista OS and I’m probably running out of room. You indicated above that you increased the size on your Vista OS. What size did you increase it to? Would you consider this optimal?
Thanks
and how exactly are you gonna run a 2nd os on your 2nd screen on a systems that does only mirror or extend the desktop?