Saturday, October 31, 2009

Boot Camp under VMWare Fusion

After playing around with Windows 7 under Boot Camp on my iMac I decided to give VMWare Fusion a try. I launched VMWare Fusion and was surprised that it had my Boot Camp partition listed in my Virtual Machine list. It went through a configuration stage which lasted about a minute and began to boot the virtual machine, boot time was much faster than running a traditional Virtual Machine and once I logged in it automatically started to load the VMWare Tools software.

Now I have the option to run my Boot Camp installation either by booting directly into the Windows 7 partition or run it as a Virtual Machine with VMWare Fusion. This gives me a lot of flexibility since I won't need to restart and switch from OSX to Windows 7, I can now run them both at the same time. Unity (an option under VMWare Fusion) allows me to remove the desktop window and run any of the applications under Windows 7 as if they were installed on my OSX system.

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Friday, October 30, 2009

Windows 7 on my iMac

I’m exited about writing this post using “Windows Live Writer” which means that I’ve been able to get Windows 7 running under Boot Camp on my iMac. I still much prefer using OSX than Windows, but this will allow me to code windows specific software on my iMac.

The speed is amazing even though my iMac is two years old, it’s even snappier than my brand new Dell at work (Optiplex 960). Apple has done a great job on getting Windows running on their hardware (I think it run better on Apple hardware then hardware meant for Microsoft products). Anyway, all of my drivers have been detected with no issues what so ever.

Next, I will try to get the Boot Camp/Windows 7 partition loaded into a VMWare Fusion Virtual Machine. From what I’ve heard it runs pretty well since it’s using a partition instead of an image file.

One nice feature is being able to access all of my HFS disks directly from windows (read/write). I’ve had a few bad experiences in the past using my HFS drives on Windows boxes.

I will post any updates if I encounter any issues.

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